The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  I suppose I gave her a shocked look, because she laughed.

  “Oh, don’t be shy. We’re about the same height, aren’t we?”

  “And that’s about where the resemblance ends, as anyone with eyes can see.”

  “Let’s give them a try anyway, shall we?”

  I crossed my arms. “I’m terribly grateful, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be any use.”

  But the duchess had already lifted one of the garments in question, a sunset-yellow number, made of silk and long, elegant sunbeams. She carried it across her forearms and presented it to me along with an expression I recognized, that of the indomitable inner Wallis who wouldn’t be told no.

  “I don’t like yellow,” I told her.

  She held the sleeves to my shoulders and cocked her head to the side. “Oh, do give it a try. Please, Lulu.”

  I took the dress and went behind the Chinese screen in the corner, though not before checking the angles of the mirrors around me. As for the frock, I hadn’t much hope. Along with the olive skin and brown eyes, my Italian mother had bestowed on me a set of curves that required posted warnings in certain states, a predicament Wallis had never faced in her life. I stepped into the dress, reached around back, sucked in all the breath to the bottom of my lungs, and pulled on the zipper tab.

  And here’s the funny part: I met no resistance at all. That dress, castoff of Wallis Simpson, whose figure resembled a clothes hanger more than a living woman, slipped right over every hill and plain. “I’ll be damned,” I muttered, and stepped from the screen. Wallis clapped her hands.

  “Oh, I knew it,” she said. “A perfect fit. Yellow’s your color, darling, with that skin. You look like a dream. Come along, let’s show the duke.”

  “The duke!”

  “He adores a woman in a fine dress.”

  “I can’t possibly—”

  “Don’t be shy. He’s not busy at the moment.”

  She took my hand—Miss Drewes had disappeared—and led me out of the suite and down the hall to the stairs, toward the duke’s private study. The dress reached all the way to the floor, thank goodness, disguising the rather serviceable saddle shoes I’d worn from the canteen. The duchess was in a strange mood, ebullient, mischievous. Whatever she was, she was not unwell, and I wasn’t such a dunce that I didn’t smell a rat around the place, by now. Why, the whole affair stank to high heaven. But it was not until the duchess opened the door to the duke’s study—she didn’t knock, of course not—and, linking arms, drew me into the room, that I discovered the source of this aroma.

  He stood next to the duke, at his massive desk, wearing a neatly pressed tropical suit of pale linen and a hibiscus flower in his buttonhole. Also a wide, shy smile, which he offered to me now, along with a small white box, the best kind.

  This time it did contain a ring.

  Elfriede

  June 1916

  (Scotland)

  According to the doctor, the baby will be born in ten more weeks. On the other hand, the doctor’s nearly eighty years old and possibly deaf, and Elfriede—counting back for the hundredth time to Wilfred’s last leave at the end of November—now considers whether it might be sooner.

  “Does it matter, really?” asks Wilfred. “One week or the next. Anyway, in the end it’s up to the baby.”

  “Of course it matters. You’ve got to be here when it’s born, and in order to arrange leave—”

  “My dear love. You can’t be serious.”

  Elfriede rises on her elbow and stares down at Wilfred’s face. In June, the Scottish day never seems to end, and the light streaming through the window gathers cruelly on the lines that spread across his forehead and out from the corners of his eyes, the lines that form a pair of parentheses around that wide mouth. She cups her hand around the side of his face and touches his moustache with her thumb.

  “But you must. You must be here with me.”

  Wilfred sighs deeply and heaves himself out of bed. Except for his face and hands, his skin is so pale as to be almost white. He finds his jacket, crumpled on the floor, and bends to pick it up, to shake it out and hang it on the back of a chair, to extract the cigarette case from the breast pocket. Elfriede, still propped on her elbow, examines his body like a doctor searching for symptoms. Of course he’s as lean as ever. His long, spidery limbs flash as he moves about the room, cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, picking up his discarded clothes in a military way. “Darling, you must understand there’s a war on,” he says. “I can’t simply lark off back to Blighty whenever the mood strikes.”

  “Whenever the mood strikes? Your wife is having a baby!”

  “As do the wives of my subordinates, on a remarkably regular basis, without any promise or even chance of their getting leave.”

  “You’re a major, aren’t you? Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “Yes, it does.” He removes the cigarette from his mouth and leans his palms against the sill of the open window. “It means I’m obliged to set an example. It means I’m obliged not to ask my men to do anything I wouldn’t ask of myself. It means I’m the last chap who gets leave.”

  “That’s not fair. Look at you, you’ve lost weight. Your face, it’s aged a decade since I saw you last—”

  “Unkind.”

  “Don’t joke. Your daughter needs you. Your wife—your wife needs you terribly—”

  “Yes, and so do the wives and children of all my men, as I said, and several of those men, those husbands and fathers, they’re dead, Elfriede, dead, gone, buried under white crosses in France, or hadn’t you heard? Tucked away in a nice, warm, dry house, plenty to eat, not a gun in sight. Hadn’t you heard there’s a fucking war on, darling?”

  By the end of this speech, Wilfred’s voice roars out through the open window and shakes the trees outside. His elbows are locked, the cigarette burns from his right hand.

  “You’ll wake the house,” Elfriede says.

  He straightens and takes a deep drag from his cigarette. “I’m sorry.”

  “Of course I understand there’s a war on. My God. How many damned socks have I darned, how many bandages, how many hours do I spend with all your widows, Wilfred? How many hours in the hospital dressing wounds?”

  “I know. I know.”

  “My son. My son is fighting in some regiment in Poland, and I don’t know where, and he might be dead this minute. Johann might be dead, and God knows when I’m going to discover that fact. In some letter from the Red Cross, I suppose, or from Helga, even worse. My own husband is the sworn enemy of my own son. If you meet him in battle, Wilfred, what will you do? Will you kill him?”

  “Not if he kills me first, obviously.”

  Elfriede swings her legs out of bed, hoists herself up, and snatches her dressing gown from the floor nearby.

  “Elfriede?”

  She shoves her arms in the holes and belts the robe over her swollen breasts, her swollen belly. The door’s shut tight; she swings it open and lumbers down the hallway and down the stairs, outside, outside, even though the air’s cooling fast and turning damp, because she can’t stand another minute of her husband. Not this husband, anyway. The word’s taken on a strange new meaning over the past two years.

  They bought Dunnock Lodge ten years ago, just before Margaret was born, from a wealthy Englishman who’d gone bankrupt on railroad shares. It went unsaid that most of the money for this purchase came from Elfriede, for whom generous provision was made in Gerhard’s will. The house was far too big. In a spirit of great hope, they intended its spacious rooms to shelter not just the four of them, Wilfred and Elfriede and Johann and the new baby, but Johann’s three sisters and, of course, all further babies God might send them in the bright, new days to come. What optimism! When you’re big with child, when your marriage throbs and hums with mutual adoration, anything seems possible. But that was before the horror of Margaret’s birth, the protracted labor, the breech presentation, the botched delivery that nearly killed them both. The blackness t
hat descended afterward, just as the dark, dank Scottish winter set in, how futile. What’s the old saying? Man plans, God laughs. The years went. Charlotte’s whereabouts remained a mystery. Johann grew from boy into man, and Germany inevitably claimed its baron back. And no more babies came along.

  Until this one.

  The baby’s large, she knows that much. After seven months of pregnancy, Elfriede feels so big and so ungainly. Already she’s caught herself waddling. At the hospital, the wounded men cast her looks of alarm, as if they’re expecting her to lie down and give birth at any moment. Now, when she tries to run down the lawn to the river, she discovers she can’t quite breathe, because the baby’s stuffed in there all the way to her lungs. She slows to a walk. A rapid walk. Upon reaching the riverbank, she crosses the bridge to the small, tree-covered island where the Englishman had built a folly, as Englishmen do, inside which she and Wilfred have made love more times than she could possibly count. In fact, as she steps from the bridge onto the turf, bathed in the slow, blue twilight of a Scottish June, she recalls tramping over these grounds with Wilfred and the estate agent ten years ago, in a similar state of pregnancy, and how she and Wilfred had spotted the folly at the exact same instant, and looked at each other with the exact same thought. On the night they moved in, as soon as Johann was tucked in bed, they hurried here through the rain, hand in hand, and consecrated first the cushioned bench along the eastern side, and then—an hour or so later—the steps that led back down to the riverbank. Both of them soaked and laughing and consumed with each other. Eight days later Elfriede was bleeding to death. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Nearly a year passed before she and Wilfred made love again. Then he was off to India with the regiment. Two long years. Seven and a half months after his departure, Elfriede gave birth to a stillborn boy. She steps inside the folly and sits down on the cushioned bench along the eastern side, not for old times’ sake but because her feet can’t stand another bloody second.

  Finally the sun’s going down. What a relief, the departure of light.

  Elfriede closes her eyes and leans her head against the pillar. Some nearby robin whistles a brisk tattoo at the dying sun. How they sing, the robins of Dunnock Lodge. They woke her this morning at the first instant of sunrise. She was too thrilled to fall back asleep, because Wilfred was coming, a few days’ leave at last, he’d sent a telegram from Boulogne the night before. The shock of it, after all those months on the front! And the robins woke her at dawn. She tried on five dresses and none of them made her belly look any less disgraceful. Poor Wilfred, to come home at last and discover a hippopotamus instead of a wife.

  Of course they were used to these absences. That was the trouble with the army, wasn’t it? When Wilfred returned from India for three months of home leave, they discussed whether Elfriede and the children should accompany him back. It was too unbearable to live apart like this. Certainly Margaret was old enough. But what about Johann? He’d settled happily into boarding school at Winchester, and he was expected in Germany over the Christmas and summer holidays. And the climate was so unsuitable for young children, disease so rife. In the end Elfriede and Margaret stayed in India only six months, during which time Elfriede miscarried twice, the second time off the coast of Ceylon during the voyage home. She never told Wilfred about that one. What use? The news would only grieve him. Another year passed, another home leave. Another excruciating separation. Then the war. The regiment hurried homeward, but only to embark for France. A few hundred miles of separation instead of several thousand. But what was the difference, really? Letters arrived sooner. Theoretically, Wilfred could be home in several hours instead of several weeks. But in exchange for these blessings, Elfriede now had this monstrous crushing fear, the terror that sometimes paralyzed her; a compound terror because Johann, visiting Germany as usual during the summer of 1914, accepted a lieutenant’s commission in the Germany army upon the outbreak of war. He’s on the Eastern Front somewhere. They don’t know exactly where. Some bloody steppe. His letters, when they arrive at all, are months late and contain no more than assurances of health and of his continued devotion to his mother, his sister, and his stepfather. Love thine enemy, that’s what the Bible says.

  So you will understand the tremendous power of this small word leave in Elfriede’s life. For the past decade, her world’s swung around it. She’s orbited this sun called leave, she’s anticipated its rise and fall in her sky, she’s taken all life and light and nourishment from her husband’s faithful return. In November, of course, the sun’s scarce in Scotland, and Wilfred’s leave—also on short notice—was maybe more like an explosion in the middle of the night, like fireworks. The telegram came from London just after lunch, delayed because all the telegraph boys were run off their feet with news from the front, and she had just enough time to jump inside the Wolseley with Margaret and drive into Inverness to meet her husband off the train. Margaret spotted him first. (Elfriede’s nearsightedness gets a little worse each year.) She screamed and dashed off down the platform, and somewhere in the tangle of khaki arms and khaki legs a man lifted her up high, yes, this spindly blond girl of nine years, and spun her around in a crushing embrace. Elfriede stood absolutely still, a paralysis of joy. In her head, she heard some woman say, It’s a special kind of love, you know, between a father and daughter. Wilfred, still holding this daughter in his arms, whispered some question in Margaret’s ear, and Margaret pointed back up the platform toward Elfriede, and Elfriede, looking upon her husband’s face for the first time since the end of spring, felt the sun rise at last in her sky. That’s what leave is like.

  And yet. And yet. Even in November, something wasn’t quite right. That marvelous candlepower of Wilfred’s charisma had somehow dimmed, she thought, as she drove the Wolseley and Margaret kept up a thrilled chatter from the back seat, to which Wilfred replied with occasional and mechanical Yes darlings and Oh jolly goods. Later, when Margaret was asleep, he made love to Elfriede without a single word, rolled away and fell unconscious, woke sometime in the night to smoke beside the window, returned to bed, repeat. Elfriede counted thirteen stubs in the ashtray the next morning. And for the next five days, he did nothing but eat and sleep and copulate. Well, not entirely. In Margaret’s company, he tried his best to summon up the old sunshine and sometimes succeeded, but these efforts depleted him, and Elfriede had only his silence. His long, quiet walks around the grounds. His distant gaze at breakfast and dinner that reached across the room and through the walls to someplace far from Elfriede’s imagination. His wordless, relentless, tobacco-scented fucking in the middle of the night, sometimes the middle of the day, filling Elfriede’s womb with the stuff of life while she clung to his neck, his shoulders, his buttocks, straining for the same elusive object. She waited until the end of February to tell him she was pregnant. She wasn’t sure if the news would delight or upset him. He replied by telegram.

  DEAR BELOVED ANGEL STOP RECEIVED YOUR LETTER AN HOUR AGO STOP HAVE NOT STOPPED WEEPING STOP FORGIVE THIS BEAST YOU CALL HUSBAND STOP TAKE EVERY POSSIBLE CARE FOR YOUR DEAR SELF STOP CAN BEAR ANYTHING EXCEPT LOSS OF YOU STOP NAME HIM FOR MY FATHER STOP ALL LOVE FROM ONE WHO HAS ALWAYS ADORED AND NEVER DESERVED YOU=

  =WILFRED

  In short, more affection than she had received from him in . . . well, since the previous leave, probably.

  But now she wonders, as she leans against the pillar in the folly and listens to the robin. Affection, really? Or remorse?

  Across the damp air, a man’s voice calls out. Elfriede’s eyelids fly open. Her heart leaps: Johann! (Thus the maternal mind, swinging back and forth between child and mate.) Then she remembers that Johann’s in Poland, probably, and this voice must belong to her husband. To this Wilfred so unlike the old Wilfred, this husband who only eats and sleeps and copulates. Yes, there it goes again, a bit louder, thick with longing and exasperation.

  Elfriede!

  He’s coming closer. Naturally, if he’s taken the trouble to find her at all, he’l
l check the folly first. And maybe Elfriede already knew that. Maybe she came to this place for a reason: to be found. To be found here, in the scene of their old lovemaking, where every square inch of bench and floor and wall and step has been consecrated by one act or another, in one position or another. It’s like an album of their marriage, the carnal aspect of it anyway, in which the photographs are memories. Elfriede’s come here to be found by her husband. There must be a reason.

  Maybe it’s Lucy MacLeod? Mrs. MacLeod, you know, whose husband—a lieutenant under Wilfred’s command—was killed last winter, blown apart by a shell in the middle of a muddy February day, somewhere near Albert. As you might expect, there wasn’t much left of Lieutenant MacLeod’s body to bury. Just the identification tags and some disarticulated bones and burned flesh. (Lucy doesn’t know these details, of course; Wilfred confided them to Elfriede in one of his more candid letters.) Elfriede’s visited Mrs. MacLeod frequently over the past several months, providing comfort as duty requires the commanding officer’s wife. Duty, and maybe a little fear too, because doesn’t Elfriede know all too well how catastrophe strikes? And by easing the suffering of others, can’t you earn some reprieve from suffering yourself? Of course, Elfriede doesn’t actually make this cold calculus in her own head as she brings books and toys for the little MacLeods, as she sits by Mrs. MacLeod on the sofa and holds her hand. It’s more like an instinct, a moral instinct, a game played deep inside the region of the subconscious mind.