Autumn Softly Fell

by Dominic Luke

  There was a wagon waiting in the road festooned with flowers and bits of bunting (left over from the Jubilee, according to Nora). Jem and Pippa climbed aboard. The wagon rolled away. A concourse of people followed on foot, chatting, smiling, laughing, Nora was amongst them. Dorothea waved and Nora waved back, pointing her out to a woman walking at her side – a woman who could only be Nora’s mother, they were so much alike. Walking with them was an old man with white whiskers and a weather-beaten face. His eyes, dark as a crow’s, cast a keen glance in Dorothea’s direction. Noah Lee, thought Dorothea, Nora’s grandfather. She shivered, for the glance did not seem entirely friendly.

  ‘So lovely,’ murmured Mlle Lacroix as the people dwindled away along the street. ‘Très beau. Très hereux.’ She sighed. ‘But now—’ She stirred, closing her parasol. ‘I am going to the shop, Dorossea. Will you come?’

  But Dorothea said no, she would wait outside on the Green and as Mlle Lacroix walked towards the shop, Dorothea took a seat on an old bench (a plank nailed to two sawn pieces of tree trunk) under the twisted boughs of a sycamore.

  So that was a wedding, she said to herself: lovely, as the governess had said. But, sitting there, Dorothea found all her excitement and happiness slipping through her fingers, dribbling away. She found herself thinking of the mother she had never known. What sort of frock had she worn on her wedding day? And Papa. How had he looked? Perhaps in those far-off days he too had owned a Sunday suit like Jem. If so, it was long gone. She remembered once – many, many years ago – coming across a little wooden box. Her tiny fingers had grappled with the lid. Inside there had been lots of pieces of paper which had delighted her infant mind. She realized now that those pieces of paper had been pawn tickets. What had they represented, all those tickets? What cherished possessions had been lost forever, sacrificed to a greater need? Who now was wearing Papa’s Sunday suit? And the little box, what had become of that? Her papa had taken it off her, prised it out of her grasping fingers. She had never seen it again.

  She had been lost in her thoughts but now suddenly looked up, startled to find that she was no longer alone. Five boys were standing in a row, staring at her. The midmost boy, the one who was scowling most ferociously, was Nibs Carter.

  Her heart was thumping as she got to her feet. She was outnumbered, alone.

  Nibs Carter stepped forward. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘What are you doing in our village?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You don’t belong here, a toff like you. You belong up at the big house with all the other toffs.’

  ‘But … but I haven’t done anything!’ cried Dorothea desperately.

  ‘I haven’t done anything!’ Nibs sneered. The other boys laughed. They closed in around her, jostling her, plucking at her frock the way Cook plucked a chicken. It only made it all the more terrible that this was happening here, on the peaceful Green, beneath the heavy green boughs of the sycamore.

  ‘Putting on airs. Swaggering about as if you owned the place.’ Nibs’s face was up close to hers. She could see the streaks of dirt on his cheeks, smell his sour breath. ‘Well, you’d best not come here again – or it’ll be the worst for you!’

  Dorothea felt giddy but just then a bell jangled. On the far side of the Green, the door of the shop opened. Mlle Lacroix came out with her parasol and a parcel in brown paper. She looked around, espied the little group by the bench.

  ‘Dorossea! It is time to go now!’

  The boys stepped back as the governess glided across the grass towards them. Nibs Carter turned to face her, squaring his shoulders but Mlle Lacroix was not perturbed, her expression unchanged, her eyes bright and inquiring as always, as if, at any moment, she expected to make some great discovery – under a stone or round the next corner or upon opening the pages of some old, old book.

  ‘What friends are these, Dorossea?’

  Dorothea could not speak but her terror was subsiding. Soon she would be under the protection of the governess’s broad-brimmed hat.

  The governess advanced and abruptly the boys broke rank, scattering like dry leaves before the breeze. As he ran, Nibs shouted over his shoulder, ‘Remember what I said, posh girl! Just remember!’ Then they were gone. The Green was empty and peaceful once more.

  ‘Who were they, those boys, ma petite?’

  ‘They were … nobody, they were nobody. Shall I carry your parcel, mam’zelle?’

  ‘Ah, merci. And now we must go back, yes?’

  They crossed the street, hand-in-hand, and took the little path that slipped between the vicarage and the churchyard, leading towards Row Meadow. The sun had gone in. Grey clouds were churning in the sky behind Rookery Hill. The world seemed suddenly colourless and flat.

  Looking back as she climbed the stile into the meadow, Dorothea could see one corner of the Green glimmering remote behind her. There was no place for her here, she thought. There was no cottage where she might have lived with her papa and a mother who hadn’t died and unknown brothers and sisters. She did not belong in the village any more than she belonged up at the house.

  Where, then, did she belong?

  After tea Dorothea could not settle. The day room seemed as dull and dreary and confining as it had done in the old days. The day outside had turned overcast. Standing at the barred window, she suddenly remembered the flowers that she had picked on the way back from the village. She had left them on the table in the hall. Dared she go and fetch them?

  She looked round. Nanny was snoozing, the governess deep in her book. Creeping quietly out of the room, Dorothea slipped past the green baize door and ran helter-skelter down the stairs with her heart in her mouth. But the house was unusually quiet and somnolent, almost as if it was deserted.

  The flowers were on the little table where she’d left them. They looked small and wilted compared to the vast blooms in the tall vase and yet in the meadow they’d seemed so bright and happy! She felt a reluctance to touch them, hesitated, glancing around the hall, as if she wanted to find something.

  She sighed. She was not sure what she wanted to find. The clock ticked ponderously, remorselessly. The front door was ajar. She could just imagine what her uncle would say, frowning and shaking his head. ‘A house full of servants and still the front door is left open!’ He thought it profligate, having so many servants. ‘We had none in Seton Street when I was a boy; even when we moved to Forest Road we had just one maid and a cook.’ When he spoke like that Dorothea felt as if a curtain was being lifted, giving her a glimpse into his past; she felt almost as if she was beginning to get to know him. But she understood the house, too, whereas he did not. The house required attendants, acolytes. If it was to be placated, if it was not to be roused from its eternal sleep, the time-honoured rites had to be performed – grates must be blacked, fires lit, meals carried up in procession. But the attendants were only human, individuals, beneath their smart uniforms. So the front door was left ajar – by Tomlin, perhaps, who could be slapdash, or Bessie Downs, lazy.

  Dorothea went to close the door so that Uncle Albert would not huff and puff, so that Tomlin or Bessie Downs would not be taken to task, but at the last moment, instead of pushing it to, she stepped outside to stand on the doorstep. It was a still, breathless evening, on the cusp of dusk, the memory of daylight like a faint glimmer in the air. Rain was falling, coming down thinly and softly in long straight lines. There was no sound but the sigh it made in falling, and the steady drip-drip-drip of a leaky gutter. Everywhere was wet, apart from the doorstep under the canopy, and an island of dry beneath the cedar tree. The wall which separated off the gardens seemed almost to glow, its red bricks stained a darker red.

  The profound peace soaked into her like the rain soaking into the ground. All fear, excitement, boredom, joy, despair was rubbed out and smoothed over. Not that the world itself had changed. No. Even here she could sense it, feel it, almost hear it, coming remote from over the horizon – or was it merely memori
es stirring in her mind? She could hear cats howling as they fought to the death, drunks squabbling in the street, a famished child feebly grizzling. She knew without doubt that there were places – far away but all too real – where the air was not clean and washed, but rank and choking, where nameless horrors lurked in the shadows, where evil eyes peered in the dark. In slimy gutters, tattered old men sat without hope, talking to themselves. People slunk along next to sooty walls, their shoulders slumped. They climbed unlit, foetid stairs. They lay down to sleep on bare boards. Rats swarmed. Fleas bit. Misery, hunger fogged people’s eyes. And even here, even in Hayton, in this very house, there were reminders. She saw Nibs Carter’s eyes, brown and brutal. She saw the moth plunge again and again into the extinguishing flame.

  No, the world had not changed. These things were true; she had seen them all. But she no longer felt overwhelmed by it. It was as if she had been standing on a beach with a mountainous wave racing towards her threatening to wash her away. It had crashed in ruin, sending up mountains of spray, reaching out long feelers towards her—only to seethe and fade and dribble away across the sand. What did anything matter when set against the soft-falling rain, the still and quiet of the evening, the vast grey-dark sky? There was a feeling, a whisper, a presence – here, there, everywhere: in the rain, in the sky, in the dripping trees, in the air itself. Dorothea felt it vibrating inside her. It was like a steady smile at the back of everything. Was it God perhaps? Or was it something else? But maybe that was what God really was – a steady smile at the back of everything.

  God – Mlle Lacroix’s God – would never make a world where wickedness would flourish and horror win out. Horror and wickedness were nothing, as flimsy as dandelion seeds on the wind, mould to be scraped easily away. The fiery furnaces could be snuffed out as easily as a candle flame. All that mattered was here and now: the doorstep, the rain, the sigh in the air and the house – the house that endured, the house with its time-honoured rites. This was not flimsy, this could never be snuffed out and one did not have to be a goody-goody to believe in it.

  Dorothea stood on the doorstep, breathing slowly, holding on to this great discovery as the rain came down and dusk deepened into night.

  FIVE

  DOROTHEA YAWNED, HOLDING on to her new hat, the yellow ribbons flying in the wind. She watched Richard sleeping beside her with a rug over his knees; she watched fields, hedgerows and grassy verges spin past as the motor bowled along the road. They were on their way back to Clifton, taking what Henry called the scenic route. Henry was driving, Uncle Albert sitting beside him, talking in raised voices above the noise of the engine.

  ‘They’re simply not reliable, these machines of yours, Fitzwilliam. You can ride a hundred miles one day, and not budge an inch the next.’

  ‘Teething problems are only to be expected, sir, in something as new as an autocar, but improvements are being made all the time.’

  ‘They’re so infernally complicated!’

  ‘No more complicated than a bicycle.’

  ‘Oh, come, Fitzwilliam, I’m not having that! There are many more component parts in an autocar – so many more things to go wrong! And what do you do when you need to replace one of those parts, eh? Answer me that!’

  ‘Components can be something of a headache, sir, I’ll grant you. But I often find that, with a little jiggery-pokery, I can reuse what I’ve already got. And if all else fails, there’s Young, the blacksmith’s apprentice. He’s a dab hand at rustling up what I need. He’s quite taken with autocars.’

  ‘You youngsters, with your fads and fancies.’ Uncle Albert shook his head as if he disapproved but Dorothea knew better. After two and a half years, she felt as if she’d known him all her life. She smiled at the thought, but the smile turned into another yawn.

  Although she had expressed disappointment when, after the picnic, she had discovered a puncture in her tyre, she was secretly relieved to be riding with Richard and Henry and Uncle Albert. Three miles was a long way to cycle back to Clifton, and Roderick would have wanted to race her all the way.

  Uncle Albert had dubbed their trip the Great Expedition. They had ventured to far-flung Lawham, the furthest Dorothea had yet ridden. She, Roderick and Mlle Lacroix had cycled; Richard, Henry and Uncle Albert had gone in Bernadette. The governess went to Lawham every Sunday to attend her church, but Dorothea had never been there before. Lawham was where Nora’s brother Jem worked in a shoe factory. It was also the place where many of the tradesmen who supplied Clifton had their businesses. Once it had been a thriving place. Henry had told them all about it as they ate their picnic amongst the ruins of the old priory – how Lawham had been an important stop on a busy coaching route, how there had been more inns and taverns than you could count. There were still a few inns remaining, relics of the boom times; but the horse-drawn coaches had long since disappeared. The town had become a backwater, so old-fashioned that the railway – which had been its ruin – had only arrived barely twenty years ago.

  A surprise had awaited them in town today. They had found a crowd gathered on the Market Place, waving flags and cheering. A brass band had been playing marching tunes next to the flower-bedecked water pump. Swinging along in perfect step, rank after rank of soldiers had passed by, heads held high, eyes to the front, uniforms spotless, boots and buttons gleaming.

  ‘They are home from the war,’ Mlle Lacroix had said, ‘the war in L’Afrique du Sud.’

  ‘Is one of them Mrs Somersby’s son?’ Dorothea had asked.

  But Roderick had scoffed. ‘Don’t be such a dunce. This is an entirely different regiment.’

  Mlle Lacroix had watched the scene with a sad smile on her lips. ‘These people – so carefree, so patriotic – they forget all those who will never return.’

  Because they are dead, Dorothea had thought with a catch in her throat. They will never return because they are dead. She had felt, then – for a brief moment – as if a glittering surface had been scratched away. The sunshine had faded, the music seemed to falter. She had thought of Roderick’s toy soldiers squashed and mangled on the nursery floor nearly a year ago. But what did a real soldier look like, dead?

  ‘Why do they forget, mam’zelle?’

  ‘It is easy to forget what war is like, ma petite, when war is far away. But in France it is only thirty years since les Prussiens came. Mon père, he was a young man then. He lived in Paris. The city was besieged. There was much hardship.’

  ‘War will never come to England!’ Roderick, who hated to be left out of anything, had muscled his way into the conversation. ‘England is the most powerful country in the world, with the biggest empire. Nobody will dare to attack England!’

  Mlle Lacroix had smiled at him. ‘France has her empire too, Monsieur Roderick. She has a long and glorious history. Think of Le Roi Soleil; think of Napoleon!’

  ‘Napoleon was the biggest scoundrel who ever lived.’ Roderick had dismissed France’s long and glorious history with a casual curl of his lip.

  Picturing the scene as she sat on the back seat of the motor holding on to her hat, it was the feeling that the glittering surface was being scratched away that she recalled most strongly. She shuddered. Someone had walked over her grave, as Nora would have said. Did Roderick sense such things? Did he try to imagine what a dead soldier looked like? She didn’t believe that he did. How agreeable to be Roderick, so brazen and untroubled!

  Glancing at the parcel on the seat next to her, she felt glad that she was soon to pay off her debt to him. The toy soldiers which had been destroyed on his birthday a year ago would be replaced at last on his next in a few weeks’ time, for luck had smiled on her and she had become rich. She had been given a whole half sovereign, and all because of Richard. And so the journey to Lawham had served a purpose, despite the disappointment of the punctured wheel.

  ‘Just a puncture, nothing to worry about,’ Uncle Albert had said. ‘I’ll mend it in a jiffy when we get back.’

  ‘Bernadette gets punctures t
oo,’ Henry had consoled her. ‘I’m forever having to change her wheels.’

  ‘Yet another drawback to those machines of yours,’ Uncle Albert had said with a glint in his eye. This had begun the conversation which was continuing still as Henry’s motor bumped and jolted over the ruts in the Newbolt Road.

  ‘I’ll say this much, young Fitzwilliam – you make a good advocate for these horseless carriages or whatever you like to call them. Puts me in mind of a chap I met on the train the other day. He was all for these new-fangled things, too. Talked a lot of sense, as it happens. He’s designed some new type or model but he can’t get any backing for it. I’ve got his name and address here somewhere, just in case.’

  ‘Just in case of what?’ Henry gave Uncle Albert a wary glance. ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn, sir, and I’m all for motors as you know but there are a lot of charlatans out there who see the motor craze as a way of making easy money.’

  ‘I think I’d back myself to spot a charlatan, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes, now that you mention it, I would, sir. But why this sudden interest – if you don’t mind me asking? I thought you had no time for motors.’

  ‘I like to keep an open mind, Fitzwilliam. Move with the times. That’s how I got involved with bicycles. I might still be making watches otherwise. Flogging a dead horse. Now these machines of yours – they might be just a fad, then again they might not. Same was said about bicycles in the beginning and look how they’ve taken off! I’ve even seen some motorized bicycles at the Cycle Show in recent times. All the same, there doesn’t seem to any money in the motor trade. Companies are forever going out of business.’