Gwen must have tired of the proofs, Constance saw, for they had been replaced on the desk. Gwen was standing now, next to that desk. She had seen the mauve letter then…. Well, Constance had half intended that she should. Why hide it, after all? The letter had lain there, in the rest of that muddle, for weeks. Her father had not bothered to reply. Gwen might not have written to her father; other women, less discreet, had no such scruples.
The letter—only one page—lay open. The paper on which it was written smelled of scent. The writing on it—a large, impulsive female hand—could be read at arm’s length. Gwen, who—unlike Constance—did not stoop to read private letters, had, it seemed, been unable to avoid the contents of this one.
For a moment Gwen seemed quite unaware that Constance had returned. She stood by the desk, frozen in the act of turning away. The blood had rushed into her neck; as Constance stood looking at her, it suffused Gwen’s face. Gwen made a small sound. She blinked. With some dignity she turned to the door and, at the door, lowered her veil.
Big, slow, stately Gwen. She gave orders to the carriers, when they finally cleared these rooms, that all letters and private correspondence should be boxed and brought down with the other effects to Winterscombe. At Winterscombe, when they arrived, she gave explicit directions. These boxes should be left sealed. They should then be burned at the earliest opportunity.
Gwen returned with Constance to her Mayfair house. Constance walked stiffly into the house in her black coat and hat, with her small black suitcase in her hand. The rest of the family were having tea by the fire in the library.
To Gwen’s surprise, Constance marched into this room, still in coat and hat, still carrying her pathetic little suitcase, and took up a position center stage, before the fire. Denton sat opposite her, clearly stupefied by this interruption, a rug over his knees, the hand holding his cup half raised between lap and lips. His four sons, quicker to take in the situation than their father, were in the act of rising to their feet.
Constance looked from one to the other with apparent equanimity. “I have my things now.” She indicated the case. “I want you to know. I shall be very glad to live with you. It is very kind of you to take me in.”
Gwen, in the doorway, looked at Constance with an impotent distress. Her plans for Constance, discussed with the child, and with Denton, who had given them his resigned and bewildered consent, had not been discussed with her sons.
They took the news—that Constance Cross the Albatross would now be with them all the time, not just for a few weeks a year—in a predictable way. Steenie clapped his hands with genuine delight; his three elder brothers could not disguise their dismay.
Boy blushed crimson; he fixed his eyes on the carpet at his feet. Freddie gave an audible groan, which he attempted to disguise as a cough. Acland, who found it difficult to conceal dislike, and usually did not bother to try, gave Constance a cold and suspicious look. He glanced up toward his mother. Across the room his oddly beautiful eyes met hers; he was perhaps angry, perhaps—and this was odd—amused. Gwen, disconcerted, found it impossible to tell.
Constance regarded her new family with apparent poise. Her small sharp chin tilted. The very model of a dutiful and loving child, she advanced upon Denton. She reached up on tiptoe. Denton, outflanked and outfaced, had to bend to receive the kiss.
She turned next to Steenie, whom she hugged. She paused, then solemnly advanced upon each of his brothers in turn. Boy, Freddie, Acland: each must have his kiss.
All three older boys were well schooled in manners. Being much taller than Constance, each was forced to bend to receive the proffered peck on the cheek.
Only Acland, the last to be kissed, spoke. He did so quietly, into Constance’s ear, as her face was lifted to his. One word only, which Constance alone heard.
“Hypocrite,” he said. That was all.
Yet Constance was delighted. She stepped back from Acland, and a sudden and genuine animation could be read in her face. Her eyes lit; her lips curved. She considered the word, she later wrote, a declaration of war.
THREE
I
A DECLARATION OF WAR
“SO, HOW’S IT GOING?” Wexton called through the open door of his kitchenette. “Are you advancing or are you stalled?”
I could hear the sounds of cans being opened; an electric toaster popped. Wexton was preparing supper for me from his much-loved hoard of convenience foods. Wexton’s kitchen gods were Heinz and Campbell; he never ceased to be delighted and surprised by the glories that came in cans. What would it be tonight? Oxtail soup, with a dash of sherry, or corned-beef hash with Worcestershire sauce, or would it be that favorite of his, a concoction dating back to the days of rationing, involving ketchup and toasted cheese and known as a Blushing Bunny? Whatever it would be, Wexton had one inviolable rule: No one was allowed to watch when he was cooking.
“I’m not sure,” I called back through the door. “Running very fast on the spot, I think. The appraiser from Sotheby’s came yesterday. I saw the estate agents today. So I suppose I’m making progress. But, Wexton, there’s so much stuff—”
“Damnation.” Wexton gave an anguished cry. A smell of burning toast filled the air. There was the sound of a toaster being punched. I knew better than to interfere in Wexton’s love-hate relationship with his toaster. I moved away to the window, maneuvering through piles of newspaper clippings and books.
Wexton, the least violent of men, seemed to have his mind on violence: All these clippings concerned the violent events of the past violent year. The war in Vietnam, the civil war in Nigeria, assassinations in America, potbellied Biafran children in an advanced state of starvation. Wexton’s quiet and donnish room was stacked with the evidence of man’s current inhumanity to man.
Leaning against the window, I looked out. The view was tranquil; it gave the illusion time could stop. Apart from the presence of motorcars, it was a view that had changed little in two hundred years. The old streetlamps had been retained; the Queen Anne and Georgian houses, much prized, were carefully restored. This street (the reason it was prized, I suppose) resisted the twentieth century.
I could just see the church at the end of the street, and the trees that flanked the south side of the old Hampstead cemetery. Wexton liked to live near graveyards, or so he said. He liked to read old tombstones. This graveyard was his favorite in London; he visited it every day when he took what he would describe as his morning constitutional.
Out of his house, along Church Row, up past the graveyard with its urns and graceful sepulchers, through the warren of small lanes and passageways to the top of Holly Hill, from where he would descend to the village shops, to stare lovingly at the soup cans in the grocer’s.
This daily progress of his, reported once in a Sunday newspaper, was now celebrated. It attracted fans. They would lurk in Church Row, waiting for the famous poet to emerge, adjust his battered hat, lift his great lined face to the sky, and sniff the morning air.
Wexton-spotters. The previous day, apparently, one had asked for his autograph. It was the first time this had ever happened.
“Did you give it to him, Wexton?”
“It was a her. She was wearing a long velvet dress, Indian beads, and a peace badge. Sure, I gave her an autograph. I wrote, ‘All the best, Tom Eliot.’ She was delighted.”
I picked up a book from the top of the pile next to me. Perhaps Wexton’s mind ran on Eliot as well as violence, for it was a dog-eared copy of The Waste Land. I read the lines about Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant, with her wicked pack of cards. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. I put the book down. I had not yet told Wexton how I had spent the past week at Winterscombe. Or about Constance’s journals.
“Deviled sardines. On toast. Unburnt toast.” Wexton advanced, with a tray.
Between us we managed to clear enough space among books and clippings to put the tray down. We balanced our plates on our knees, sat in front of Wexton’s fire—he liked coal fires—and m
unched. The room was peaceful and companionable; the sardines were peppery and excellent. Wexton, who surely knew I was keeping something back—he always did—steered the conversation within careful boundaries.
“So. Tell me about the appraiser,” he said, still munching.
“He likes the Victorian furniture. The Pugin chairs, and that Philip Webb painted cabinet. When he saw the William Morris hangings he went into a rapture. His name’s Tristram.”
“Wow,” said Wexton.
“That’s nothing. The real-estate agent is called Gervase. Gervase Garstang-Nott.”
“Does he have raptures too?”
“Not noticeably. Think laid-back. In fact, think horizontal. Think if-it-was-Blenheim-I-might-just-get-interested.”
“As bad as that?”
“Worse, really. Nothing but negatives. Wrong date—everyone wants Queen Anne. Too far from London. Too far from the station. Too big—only institutions want houses with twenty-five bedrooms, apparently, and institutions won’t spend money. A nibble when I mentioned the woods—because the timber might be worth something. A flicker when we got around to the acreage—if planning permission could be obtained to build. He’s coming down next week. He made it sound as if that were a great favor.”
Wexton gave me a keen glance.
“Depressing?”
“Yes. I suppose it was. I don’t want the woods cut down. They’re beautiful. I don’t want to see houses on all the fields. Maybe that’s selfish, but I don’t. And I’d have liked someone to want the house. Barring an eccentric millionaire, apparently that’s not very likely. I know it’s large, Wexton. I know it’s Edwardian. I know it’s dilapidated. But I love it. I think of all the care that went into it, all the things that happened there—” I stopped. “Anyway. What I feel is irrelevant. Other people don’t feel that way, it seems. Either I’m blindly biased or there’s something wrong with me.”
“Have some ice cream.” Wexton rose. “It’s a new brand I discovered. American. We can have it with cherries. Tinned cherries. They’re really pretty good.”
“I don’t think I could eat anything else, Wexton. This was lovely. Sorry.”
“Okay.” Wexton sat down again. He hunched over in his chair. “Look,” he said at last. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really wrong?”
I told him. At least, I told him some of it. I explained about the chaos Steenie had left behind, the boxes and trunks, the family papers, the bundles of letters, journals, photograph albums—all that fallout from the past. I did not tell him about Constance’s journals. I almost did but, in the end, held back.
Wexton would not have approved of those journals. He might have told me to get rid of them, burn them—and it might have been sound advice. There were things in those journals, especially those written by Constance’s father, that sickened me, and to which I had no wish to return. There were other things that, placed side by side with other evidence still in the house, both alarmed and intrigued me. It was like an addiction, this investigation of the past—I could already see that. The past gave me a fix.
Perhaps that was why I was secretive—and with Wexton, of all people. Wexton, with whom I was always frank. As an alcoholic might hide bottles, I hid the fact of those journals. That way it was easier: I could pretend I did not need them, that I wouldn’t take another drink. I’m quite sure Wexton knew I was being evasive; always careful of others’ reticence, he did not prompt. I felt ashamed. I loved Wexton, and with those you love, evasion is as bad as a lie.
“It … muddles me, I suppose, Wexton,” I finished. “There the past is. I thought I knew it, and I find I don’t. I recognize the places, but I don’t recognize the events. They sound so different now, not the way I remember people telling them at all. And I don’t recognize the people, either—that’s the worst part. Aunt Maud, Uncle Freddie … well, maybe I recognize them. But Jenna. My father and mother…. They’re different, Wexton. And it hurts.”
“That’s predictable, you know,” he said quietly.
“I know it is. It’s predictable, and stupid—I know that. Obviously they’re different. Obviously they had lives before I ever knew them, and they grew up and changed….” I hesitated. “But now I feel as if I never knew them at all, as if all my own memories were false. I suppose that’s it. I want them back.”
“Then stop. You don’t have to read all that stuff. All right, you don’t want to junk it. Okay. But you can just pack it away. Look at it some other time. When you’re older, maybe—”
“Oh, come on, Wexton. I’m almost thirty-eight. If I can’t cope with it now, when can I? Besides … I can’t explain. The moment feels right.”
“I guess it is right then. Trust your instincts.” Wexton looked at his hands. “You’re following some chronology? How far have you got?”
“Oh, ’round about the first war. No. Not as far as the war. Just before: 1910, 1912. I’m not being too meticulous—just trying to put things in some kind of order. When Constance first went to live at Winterscombe, her father’s death—there’s a lot about that.”
“Before my time. I was still in America then.”
“But you heard about it, Wexton? I mean, Steenie must have talked about it, or my parents. About Constance and her father and the … accident he had. They must have talked about that?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember too well. Why not ask Freddie? After all, he was there.”
“I can’t. He’s away. His annual expedition. He was thinking about Peru, but in the end they settled for Tibet.”
Wexton smiled. My uncle Freddie’s annual excursions to the more remote parts of the globe delighted Wexton; he found them, as I did, impressive. Also comical.
“May I make a suggestion?” Wexton, still hunched in his chair, gave me a considering look.
“Of course, Wexton. I know I’m floundering about. Maybe you’re right and I ought to stop.”
“I didn’t say you should stop. I said you could stop. Why not take a look at the war years?”
“The First World War, you mean?”
“It might be an idea.” He shrugged. He made a church steeple of his fingers. “Maybe the problems you’re having—not recognizing people you thought you knew—well, why not think of it as a generation gap? You see, you weren’t yet nine when the last war began. You spent the war years in America. But if you’d been, say, five years older, if you’d been in London at the time of the Blitz, it would have left its mark on you. Take anyone who fought in that war—it doesn’t matter what nationality; they could be Russian, American, British, Australian, German, Polish—they still have a common ground, a common experience. They can be difficult to understand, if you don’t share that.”
“And the first war was the same, you mean?”
“Of course. That war above all. It marked all of us. Your grandparents, your uncles, your father and your mother—especially them, I think. Even … even Constance.”
I turned back to the window. I was surprised Wexton should mention that name. I also knew he might be right. I could already see it was to war that these journals were leading. War was one of Constance’s favorite words, although when she used it, it often had no connection with politics or with military matters. I turned back to Wexton uncertainly.
“How do I look at the war, Wexton? The letters from the front line—is that what you mean?”
“No. Not exactly.” Wexton answered me quietly. He looked abstracted, distant, as if his mind were far away from this room, from me. There was a long silence; then he seemed to rouse himself. He stood and put an arm around my shoulders.
“You’re tired. I can see all this has upset you. Don’t listen to me. I’m getting old—and I’m probably barking up the wrong tree. I’ve got war on my mind at the moment—that’s probably it.” He waved his hand at the piles of newspaper clippings.
“The thing is, I’ve never been to these places. Africa. Southeast Asia. But that’s not the point. It’s not the terrain that interests me, or the poli
tics or the weaponry. I’m not writing about napalm. The journalists do that better than I ever could, and when they’ve finished, the historians can take over. No, it’s not that. I wanted to write about—”
He stopped, in the middle of his sitting room. Wexton rarely discussed his own poetry; when he did so, it always made him first agitated, then self-deprecating, then gloomy. His manner was never that of the sage. He resembled someone trying to explain a particularly abstruse knitting pattern.
“I wanted to write … about war as a state of mind. Yes, I think that’s it. It does exist. I’ve seen it. Soldiers—they have to be trained to attain it. But other people reach it as well. Some are born with it, perhaps. People who’ve never carried a gun. People who’ve never been near a front line. It’s inside us all, waiting. Bayonets in the brain. That’s what I wanted to write about … I think.”
His face fell. The creases and crevasses rearranged themselves into mournful folds.
“I even finished it. Yesterday. The first part of it. Of course it was no good at all. When I looked at it this morning, I could see—it was embarrassing. Dishwater verse.”
“What did you do with it, Wexton?” I asked him gently.
“Tore it up,” he said. “What else?”
I knew Wexton, I knew his hints, and I respected them. Wexton rarely gave advice. If he did so, it was usually astute. The more casual and dismissive his manner when he made a suggestion, the better it was likely to be.
When I returned to Winterscombe, and returned to the past, I opened Constance’s journals at my uncle Freddie’s nineteenth birthday, the day war was declared.
I was camped in a corner of the drawing room. In the rooms beyond, Tristram Knollys and his team of assistants were embarking on an inventory. They were making lists: every painting, every rug, every piece of furniture. Constance, too, made lists that day, but her lists were very different.
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