by Belva Plain
She looked at him, not understanding. “I saw the sketch of Ned, I think it was Ned. Was it? So I came here.” He stopped. “I’m not making any sense.” She let the hoe drop. “What are you doing here?”
“Here? Or in England, do you mean?”
“You’ve just come to England?”
“No. Since last fall.”
They stood looking at each other for a minute.
“You’ve not grown any older,” she said.
“Eleven years older.”
The years had told on Mary. There were some lines on her forehead which had not used to be there; also a thinning of the cheeks so that the enormous eyes were deeper.
“Is Alex here?” he asked.
He hadn’t planned the question; indeed had had no thought of what he would say when he got here. But the question sounded normal enough.
“With Montgomery in North Africa. He volunteered.”
There seemed then nothing to say.
“You’re well?” she asked. “Your family’s well?”
How queer and formal she sounds! he thought. The questions confused him.
“My family?”
“Your wife. Your boy. Aunt Milly writes to me sometimes. That’s how I know.”
The word “wife” flustered him. “Oh yes, yes, everyone is well,” he answered awkwardly.
“You’ve been seeing Claire again.”
“Yes, yes, I have.”
“I was glad to hear it.”
Again he thought: How correct she is!
The sun, glittering in his eyes, gave him an excuse for looking away. He felt that he hardly knew this woman. He felt quite numb inside.
“Will you come in, Martin? We have five children now and I have to help with the supper for them.”
He was astonished. “Five?”
For the first time she smiled. Faint lines fanned from the corners of her eyes.
“No, no, mine are away. Ned’s in the RAF and the girls are at boarding school. These are evacuees from the bombing.”
“Then you must be busy. I’m keeping you.”
“You’re not keeping me.”
He followed her into the house.
“Sit down while I set the table,” she said.
He sat down stiffly with his cap on his knees and watched her laying the places at the carved oak table, an earthenware plate and mug at each plate. He remembered her sitting at that table, wearing velvet. He shouldn’t have come. How could he tell what feelings she might have toward him now? Embarrassment, no doubt. Perhaps even anger. It was possible. Anything was possible.
“Have you come by car?” she asked abruptly.
“No, I took the train.”
“Then you’ll have to stay the night There’re only three trains a day now, and the last one’s already left.”
“I’m sorry! I never thought! Perhaps there’s a room somewhere in the village.”
“No need. We’ve plenty of room here, even with the children.”
He tried desperately to think of something to say.
“All these strange children. They’re quite an undertaking.”
“Not really. I’ve reared three of my own, after all. These keep me company.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I’m afraid you’ll find it bedlam here until they’re all fed and sent up to sleep,” she said politely.
“I shan’t mind,” he answered as politely.
It seemed to him they were behaving like relatives, who, meeting after long silence, had found that they didn’t like each other very much anymore.
It was impossible that a bloody war was being fought! Or that there could be places like the operating room where Martin bloodied his sleeves every day. A fire was snapping on the hearth. The tough old sycamores creaked in the wind at the corner of the house. Country noises out of a Victorian novel! Nothing in the room had relevance to what was happening in the world outside it, neither the framed ancestor in the plumed hat, nor Alex’s copper-and-silver riding trophies on the mantel, nor the needlepoint bellpull to summon servants who were no longer there.
A door closed above. There were steps on the stairs, and Mary came into the room.
“I’m sorry I took so long. Hermine—she’s the youngest—still cries sometimes for her mother. It takes a while to comfort her.”
“I didn’t mind. It’s peaceful in here.”
“Peaceful and chilly.”
Kneeling, she stretched her hands out to the fire. An enormous sheep dog came in from the hall to flop down near the heat. The tall clock ticked, making a lonely sound in the stillness. At the supper table, the children had created distraction. Now again there was nothing to say.
Mary stared somberly into the fire. Presently, she looked up.
“Are you happy, Martin?”
The question, following the stiffness of their first hours, startled him. And he evaded it.
“Can anyone be happy in 1943?”
Her eyes said: That’s not what I meant.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I know you meant something else … I suppose I am.”
“Tell me about your children. First, Claire.”
“Oh,” he answered, relieved at a question he could answer with ease, “Claire’s going to be somebody! Whatever she does will be on a large scale. She’ll have a great deal of joy or a great deal of pain. Probably both.”
“That’s rather like you, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see myself. But she’s like her mother, too,” he said thoughtfully.
“Tell me, what do you know about Jessie?”
“Only secondhand reports from Claire, and not very many of those. But I can tell that the household is cheerful; that says something.”
“I think of Jessie all the time; I suppose it’s just conscience nagging.”
“Eleven years,” Martin said softly, “and it still nags?”
“Why? Don’t you ever feel it?”
Now. Now they were approaching the heart of the matter.
“Yes,” he said, “I do. But talk about something else. There’s nothing to be done about what’s past.”
“All right Tell me about your little boy. What is his name?”
“Enoch, after my father.”
“I remember your father. He was a plain man and very kind.”
“Well. My boy was three when I last saw him, a quiet baby with a kind of sweetness. Very different from Claire.”
Mary rose from her knees to sit near the fire, resting her hands on the arms of the chair. “You’re not wearing the topaz,” Martin said.
“Topaz?”
“That odd, carved ring you always wore on your little finger.”
“Oh, you remembered that! I gave it to Isabel. It was my mother’s, and Isabel is like her, even though she looks like Alex.”
“So—Alex volunteered, you said?”
“Yes. He had strong convictions about the Nazis long before most people did, and he wanted desperately to go.”
“He’s a man of spirit.”
“If he weren’t, I don’t think I could have stood it all these years.”
Back again now to the heart of the matter. This time he was less afraid.
“Has it been so terribly hard, even so?”
She clasped her hands. He had forgotten that passionate young gesture of hers.
“I don’t know. What I mean is, you come to love life more when it’s been hard, isn’t that true? There are balances. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as close to my children if things had been different Maybe I’ve learned to care more about other people.”
There was a change in the room. Suddenly he became aware that his heart had begun to race … The fire snapped. In its twisting flames flowers burst open, surf tumbled, castles towered and fell. And Martin sat quite still, letting himself be hypnotized.
At last he said, “You’ve been very strong, Mary.”
“You do what you have to do,” she said quietly.
“Do you look into the future at all?”
“Not beyond this war. When it’s over—whenever that may be—then I’ll think about the future.”
She got up and put another log on the fire, making a small thud and a rush of sparks.
“ ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ ” Martin said. And, as Mary looked puzzled, he added, “I don’t usually go around quoting Job. It just came out of my head, stuck there after all those Bible readings in the front parlor when I was growing up. Anyway, it’s glorious poetry, even if you can’t take it all as literal truth.”
“You think man is born to trouble? Doesn’t he make his own?”
“You could argue that till doomsday. Whatever the cause, though, I wish you hadn’t had so much of it.”
“My sufferings rank pretty low next to what’s happening in the world right now.”
She smiled, and with that unfolding, courageous, lovely smile, time contracted. Eleven years was yesterday. Today was eleven years ago.
“Blue eyes don’t belong in such a dark Spanish face. Or is it Greek?” he said.
“There’s no Spanish in me, or Greek either, Martin.”
He stood up. She was so close that he could see the pulse in her throat, could see the dark line where the lashes grew out of the fine, white shells of her lids, could even see a glistening of tears.
“I shouldn’t have come!” he cried out.
She didn’t answer.
“I didn’t come here to begin it all again. I swear I didn’t.”
“Oh my dear, I know that.”
Enormous happiness flooded. It surged in him. He could have shouted to the skies. He could have sung.
Chapter 21
How could he ever have convinced himself that it was over? He had wanted to believe that those few days on the southern coast of France so long ago had been simply an interlude, one of those delights, mingled with a piquant grief, that life occasionally bestows. Now he knew that those days had been not an end, but a beginning, or more exactly, the end of that beginning which had occurred when he had first walked into a room and found her there, long ago.
They met in London or at Lamb House or at an inn near the hospital. When they were unable to meet they wrote letters.
“Dear My Love,” he wrote, “All music and all grace are yours. If I could write a poem, it would start like that I sit at the window of your flat and wait for you. It is night. I can’t see you coming down the street, but I know by the sound that it is you. The front door opens softly, not with the crash that other people make who enter here, and you come up the stairs.
“I am never irritable when you are with me, I, a man always in a hurry, who runs instead of walks, who am impatient for people to complete a sentence.
“The little sounds you make are pure pleasure to me. I close my eyes and, half asleep, I listen to you turn a page. Your heels make a delightful click on the floor between the rugs. When you draw the curtains, I hear leaves rustle.
“I open my eyes and watch you pour tea. I am entranced by your hands, by everything you do.
“All this past year that we have been together, all these odd hours, are the reality of my life. The hospital and the war are its dark background.
“What have we not done together? Heard music often, sat in a bomb shelter through eerie hours, lain in an old bed in an old room at Lamb House and tried to believe that there was no time earlier or later than our long, deep, lovely night.
“Oh, Mary, it’s been a long time coming, this acknowledgment. Did you have the same long sense of loss? Like dreaming of some perfect place, some cool blue place that could be forever home, and then waking to find you’re not there and never will be?
“But why do I write like this, when I am awake and I am here now?”
The less one has of money or time, the more skillfully one learns to use them. An hour for a supper, one night in the London flat or at an inn near the hospital, rarely a whole day’s and night’s leave—these were the equal of weeks in an ordinary life. Everything was heightened, sharpened and quickened.
They walked on country lanes and rested under trees. At Canterbury, struck to silence and awe, they stood before the altar where Thomas à Becket died, went out afterward into Kentish fields, smelled the hops harvest, passed the aristocratic pile of Knole and had dinner by candlelight in a room where Dickens had dined. They rode the trains to nowhere and back. In stormy weather they took shelter in museums or stopped to watch Lady Cavendish, Adele As-taire, dancing with GIs. They wandered the streets. One day Mary took him to the place where Alex’s mother had been killed in the 1940 blitz. The very earth was mutilated, an open wound filled with a rubble of blasted stone and tumbled brick.
“She was on her way to the Anderson Shelter in the yard. She was hit not six feet from the entrance.”
Half a house stood at the far end of the enormous hole, and over it all had crept the lovely purple willow herb, a veil drawn on a disfigured face.
“It was September seventh,” Mary said. “A warm day, I remember. The leaves were blown off the trees. It was like green shredded tissue paper, all over the streets. And then there were the fires. Ships on the Thames were burning. It looked as if the river were burning too. And the streets were full of cats, isn’t that queer?”
“Cats?”
“Yes, they were lost, looking for their homes. But their homes weren’t there anymore.”
“Come,” Martin said. “Come now.”
Back in the flat they sat down to their plain supper, boiled potatoes and eggs, eaten with wine and by candlelight on the gleaming table which had once held crystal and flowers. Luminous pale fingers touched Mary’s forehead and fell across the white lace at her neck.
“The lace comes from an old teacloth that belonged to Alex’s mother. I rescued it,” she said.
The homely remark touched him. Her hands, which had once worn polished nails, looked rough. One nail was darkened from a bruise. The naturalness of these things made him feel married to her.
“You look tired,” he said. “With that house and those children, aren’t you doing too much?”
“There are only two left The others have gone back to their families. Anyway, I could say the same to you about doing too much.”
“I have no choice. Besides, I’m used to it.”
“And I’m not. I’ve been spoiled all my life.”
“That’s not a word I would ever use about you.”
“But it’s true, Martin! All that life we had before the war, all the privilege which made things for people like me so charming, that’s over, you know. Alex has been saying so for years. He saw the war coming long before any of our friends did, and he was right. So I believe him when he says it will never be the same again. And perhaps it’s just as well that people like us won’t have so much and others will have a little more.”
Yes, Martin thought, remembering the waiting room in the hospital where that other England brought its ailments, seeing again the wizened clerk-faces, sickly white, with rotting teeth.
“Only I do wish, I hope, we’ll be able to hold on to Lamb House,” Mary said.
“I hope so. I know what it means to you.”
“Oh, not for me! For Alex and the children. It’s their heritage.”
“Not for you?”
“When the war’s over,” she said quietly, “I’ll leave Alex. The girls will be grown by then, and it won’t matter anymore.”
Something opened up in Martin like a taut spring releasing.
“Leave Alex?”
“I don’t say that easily. We’ve lived under the same roof so long, he and I. My friend: that’s how I’ve come to think of him. My friend. But it’s time, or it will be soon.”
He wanted to say, to cry out to her, Then you and I? But a packet of unopened letters lay in his pocket, like a warning hand upon his flesh. That morning, a moment before he had left his room, they had arrived from home. Home. So long ago! So far away! Press the eyelid
s shut and try to imagine oneself back across that ocean, try to hear American voices. Faces dim and fade. They blur and vanish. So long ago! So far away!
From the radio in another room came the BBCs music: the majestic andante from Schubert’s great C Major. It lifted and swelled like a vast, calm, moving ocean.
He shook his head, shook himself free of complex thoughts. Not now. There’s time enough to think. She hasn’t left Alex yet. The war isn’t over. So, not tonight Just let pure sweetness flow tonight. Drink the wine, a bottle of sunshine taken from a vineyard on the Rhine before the war. There ought to be flowers on the table, but there are none. Imagine them, then. Imagine iris, and roses so darkly red as to be touched with blue. Think of Mary wearing velvet again. Remember night birds, lemons, the sigh and crash of the sea …
He dozed. Mary stroked his forehead. He had been on his feet in the O.R. for eighteen hours straight. Her fingers soothed and soothed. He was half aware of the mohair afghan being lightly settled over his shoulders. A pity to waste our little time in sleep, he thought, and struggled to keep awake, but lost.
He dreamed. His mind roved. At the same time, he knew he was dreaming.
A letter had come from Tom; at least it seemed to have come from him. He had had a terrible spinal wound, yet he wrote that he had seen Jessie somewhere in the Pacific. Jessie’s back had grown perfectly straight. She was tall and very rich, with a bag of gold coins at her waist. She was married, and her husband’s name was Alex. Claire appeared. She had a baby, a boy named Enoch, but Enoch was bigger than Claire. He was already in college. Now he was on a tanker going to Murmansk. The tanker went up in flames, while he, Martin, stood watching, unable to move. Jump! he screamed. Jump! You didn’t save him, Hazel cried. You knew he was Claire’s baby. Her face was so sad; he had never seen such a terrible sadness. But perhaps it wasn’t Hazel’s face? Was it hers or his mother’s? It was such a sad, old face. It was the first thing he had noticed about her. I’m going to Germany to look for you, Martin, she said, because it’s so lonely here without you. The word was drawn out so he could hear the wail in it: lonely.
He woke abruptly. One lamp was bright in the room, on the table next to the telephone. Mary was sitting there with her head in her hands. He saw that she had been crying.