‘It’s so marvellous to see you,’ Kitty said, her voice muffled in his shoulder.
‘Here, let me take that,’ George said. He pulled the bag on to his own shoulder. ‘Look at you, all smart in your uniform with red trimming and buckles. Brass buttons and everything! However did you persuade your father to let you go out on the rounds?’
‘He couldn’t really do otherwise. Two of the boys enlisted after you so we were short-staffed and had to take on girls. I even get to drive the cart from time to time.’
‘Shall we go to the park?’ George said. ‘Do these later?’
She took his arm and they crossed the road towards the street of guesthouses that led down Station Road towards the park. He tried to keep in step with her and make his limp less obvious but she noticed straight away and went more slowly. She kept glancing sideways at him until he said, ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ she said and squeezed his arm.
They passed through the double wrought-iron gates into the park. There had been days of rain and it had poured again earlier in the morning: puddles had formed in the ruts in the paths and as they walked under the ornamental trees, the branches released a flurry of fat drops every time the breeze caught them.
They found a bench away from the trees, beside the bowling green, and George used his handkerchief to dry two patches as best he could, so that they could sit down. Before them stretched the green, soggy and waterlogged, the pavilion with its eyes shut, boarded up for the season. In the borders next to them, a few crocuses grew from the dark earth, yellow and violet like gas flames.
‘How are you feeling?’ George asked. ‘How is it at home?’
Kitty pulled a face. ‘The memorial service was pretty awful. Before we even got there Mother burst into tears because she couldn’t find her gloves and Father shouted at her. Nobody told me that I had to walk behind them into chapel so they both glared at me and afterwards no one knew what to do, because there was no graveside to go to, and Mother and Father hadn’t arranged for anyone to come back for something to eat so everyone just drifted away. We walked home and Father shut himself away doing paperwork and Mother shut herself in Arthur’s room and wouldn’t let me in.’
‘What did you do, Kit?’
‘I just sat in the parlour waiting for Mother and had a bit of a weep.’ She turned her head away. ‘I keep thinking it would have been better for them if it had been me.’
George took her hand. ‘That’s not true. Don’t say that.’
‘I keep having the most awful nightmares. Arthur’s always somewhere I can’t get to, like a rock in the sea, or a burning building, or a boat floating down to a weir, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and then I wake up and I know I’ll never see him again …’ She put her head in her hands and George put his arm around her while she cried.
At length, Kitty felt in her pocket, looking for a handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry, loading you with all of this,’ she said, sniffing, ‘but I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re back and I’ll have you to talk to every day.’
George braced himself and told her what her father had said about his position at the post office. ‘… so I’ve lost my place,’ he finished.
Kitty was indignant. ‘That isn’t fair! He’s so bitter about Arthur he’s just taking it out on you! I’m going to speak to him about it.’
‘No, don’t bother,’ George said. ‘It’ll only make things more difficult for you. He’s not going to change his mind, and anyway, it would be uncomfortable being where I know I’m not wanted. I’ll just have to look for something else.’
‘But when will I see you?’ Kitty said mournfully.
‘We’ll just have to meet after you finish or at weekends,’ George said. ‘We can go walking as we used to, can’t we? And the evenings will soon be getting lighter. I’ve got to try and build my leg up, so you can encourage me along.’ He straightened his leg out and rubbed it. ‘Actually, I think perhaps we should walk again before it stiffens up completely.’
She stood and held out her arm to help him up. They set off across the park towards the river. The place looked forlorn: the nets all gone from the tennis courts and the fence beaded with bright drops; the little wooden hut, from which racquets were hired and ices sold, was covered in grey-green algae and had a sign that said ‘Closed until April’.
‘What kind of job will you look for?’ Kitty asked.
‘I don’t know,’ George said. ‘I wouldn’t want to work in a shop or with a lot of other people. You wouldn’t believe how people stare at you, or the comments they make.’
‘It’s more difficult when it’s out of season, otherwise there would be the boats to and from the hotel.’
‘It’s still customers, though, isn’t it?’ George sighed. ‘Even if I could put up with it, I can’t see many employers wanting me to be the person greeting their summer visitors.’
As they approached the river at the edge of the park, the noise of its rush grew louder. It was in spate after the recent rain and at the limit of its banks: a torrent, brown with mud brought down from the hills. The tumult was deafening as they walked on to the bridge, and they stood watching the debris of branches and sticks swept along at great speed in the relentless flow, under their feet and away downstream.
17
BREAKING
When Violet had received Elizabeth’s letter telling her that Edmund was missing, she had been unable to accept the possibility of his death. She could not – would not entertain it. She had swallowed the cold fear down and had written back to tell her she was sure it was a mistake, that he had probably become separated from his unit and that she was certain he would surface again soon. Nonetheless, she waited at the gatehouse every day for the new post boy and despite being wrapped in coat, scarf, hat and gloves, she shivered as she stood there, carrying the cold inside her.
When days passed and no word came, from either Elizabeth or Edmund, she wrote to the Red Cross, styling herself as his fiancée. Their answer gave a general account of the action on the day of his disappearance, which said that by 8p.m. the enemy had captured the sector and that further enquiries this side of the German line would be useless. They could only help by watching, with close care, the prisoners’ lists coming in from Germany. The mention of prisoners had been enough for her to fashion a fragile shelter: he had been captured and was safe out of the fighting, albeit in enemy hands and unable to write, or maybe he had been injured and was recovering unidentified in a German hospital; news would reach her eventually. He could not be dead; she would know if he were; she would feel it in the stones underfoot, in the smell of the rain, in the very air around her.
She evolved a set of rituals to guard herself against the doubts that assailed her: piercing draughts finding their way through her house of sticks, rattling branches and opening chinks if she stopped, even for a moment, weaving and strengthening her shelter. Every afternoon, she walked down to the little church by the lake. She let herself in, her breath misty in the still, gelid air of the tomb-like interior. Above the pulpit, an hourglass was fixed to the wall, an ancient measure for a cleric’s sermon. Violet swivelled it over so that the sand began to run; then she knelt and prayed in her own fashion: Keep him safe. Bring him back to me, over and over, as she watched the grains run through. She rocked herself as she knelt on the freezing stone floor until her bones ached and the sand ran away.
The strain of carrying on as normal in front of her mother and the servants began to tell and she was forgetful and irritable. When Mother had suggested that she needed a holiday and suggested another trip to visit Elizabeth, Violet had been startled into saying that Elizabeth’s brother was missing so it wasn’t a good time to go. Mother had said, ‘What a shame,’ and Violet had been forced to turn away and busy herself in tidying an arrangement of winter jasmine, feeling that she had betrayed Edmund by speaking of something that was cleaving her in two as if it were trouble as distant as an unknown name on the casu
alty lists.
Sometimes, alone in her room, she took out a pair of evening gloves that she kept hidden away and put them on. She had bought them in Carlisle: a cheap fix when her white ones were ruined by spilt wine. They were crocheted in a matt ecru thread, without the lustre of silk, and had lumps in the finger-ends where the thread was drawn, starbursts replacing the whorls of her fingertips. At the elbows, they had picot edging: small pale fans that spread flat against the creamy skin of her arms. She had worn them at the garden-party dance on the night that she and Edmund had become engaged. He had held her hand so tightly when they danced that the crocheted fishnet pattern had impressed itself on her palm. The thought of how, in the dimness of the garden, he had gently taken off the gloves so that they could hold hands, skin to warm skin, made her ache to touch him once more. She kept the gloves under her mattress, spread flat with all the wrinkles ironed out. Each night she imagined their open palms and fingers beneath her as she slept, cradling her back, supporting her shoulder blades and buoying her up through the dark wash and slap of her dreams.
As months passed and there was still no word, Violet wrote regularly to Elizabeth, telling her not to give up hope, using the expression of this encouragement as a means to stiffen her own resolve. She wrote again to the Red Cross, only to receive the same letter, though signed considerately with sincere sympathy in your suspense.
On a wet late afternoon in February, Violet was keeping her mother company for an hour or so, as usual. She was conscious of her mother watching her as she read aloud to her.
‘You don’t look well. Are you eating properly?’ her mother asked peevishly, drawing her bed jacket around her shoulders.
‘Of course I am.’ Violet looked up, as if in surprise, from the copy of Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal on her lap. Eating was an issue that caused friction between them. Her mother no longer came down to the dining room at midday, claiming that she disliked the smell of cooking and that the large room was too cold, reasons that Violet knew were specious. She simply wanted to hide away. It was left to Violet to entertain any visitors or to sit in solitary splendour, ‘keeping up standards’ and ensuring that all was ready if her father should arrive unannounced. On this day, the vicar had visited on Church business and Mrs Burbidge had served a beef stew at lunch, although it was true that Violet had eaten very little. Violet glanced meaningfully at the tray that still stood on the table beside her mother’s bed, and which carried the remains of a piece of toast and a boiled egg.
‘You know these new tablets do away with my appetite,’ her mother said.
Violet looked at her tired face, her hair loose to her shoulders, grey and coarse against the pillows, her lips pale. ‘Do you think they’re working though? Were the pains any less fierce this time?’ she asked. ‘Maybe you should mention it to Dr Cooper if he’s visiting today?’
Her mother sighed. ‘I don’t think they made much difference. I feel terribly washed out afterwards. Transparent.’ She put both hands up to her face and pushed her hair back from her brow. ‘Have you asked Mrs Burbidge to order the new curtain linings? The ones in my sitting room have split at the folds. Ask her to check all the rooms that catch the sun. And ask Hodges to spare one of the men to help the parlour maids to take down the drapes in the drawing room for cleaning in any case, whether they need repair or not. I know they’re short-handed, with so many enlisting, but we can’t let everything slip.’
Violet added a note to the list she already had: check with Hodges that the farm accounts were near completion; find out from Mrs Burbidge when the sweep was coming to stop the dining-room fire from smoking, and ask her to make a raised pie to see if it would tempt her mother’s appetite. Only by reassuring her mother that the house was running like clockwork could she get her into a less fractious state and encourage her towards some small endeavour or interest.
‘Shall I dress your hair, if the doctor’s coming?’
Her mother got out of bed and placed her pale, veined feet into slippers. She sat at her dressing table, a clutter of objects strewn before her: a glass powder bowl, silver-topped perfume bottles and blue medicine bottles all muddled together, a scatter of hairpins, a shoehorn and an ebony dressing-table set. She watched Violet in the mirror, noticing how she gazed out towards the lake. Was she such a burden to her daughter? She only saw Violet for an hour or two in the late afternoon, and an hour after supper for a round of gin rummy or a chapter of a romantic novel. Surely she could produce a little more conversation. She seemed to be always yearning for the outdoors, wandering down to the church or the lake with her camera, or out on the hills in all weathers.
Violet picked up the soft bristle hairbrush and gathered her mother’s hair in her hand to brush the ends first and untangle them, to avoid the tugging that Irene couldn’t bear.
‘I do feel worried about those linings. I don’t want the same inferior stuff again that Mrs Burbidge gets from Green’s,’ her mother said irritably.
‘I’ll see to it.’ Violet gently brushed her mother’s hair from the roots. She coiled it around her hand and began fixing it expertly into place with pins.
Her mother put her hand up to her temple as if it was paining her.
‘Do you still have a headache?’ Violet loosened the last pin a little.
‘You know how I suffer with my head.’
Violet longed to be on her own and not have to keep up her patient cheerfulness. If only the rain would stop, she could get out and walk, maybe climb the fell and take some more pictures. Lately she had been thinking that although she may not be able to travel to all the places she dreamt of, she could still send a few of her photos out into the world, maybe to Country Life or The Field. Perhaps she could record what she saw in words too, like nature notes, or a column …
She had discovered a place on the fell side where you could look down on all the rooks’ nests in the wintry trees and she longed to take pictures of the sculptural shapes of the angular stick nests amongst the bare, laced branches. When she was seeking out subjects to photograph, or composing her shot – concentrating on how to frame it, the best angle for the light, the effect of different exposures – she could lose herself and forget everything for a little while in the pleasure of capturing something that she thought beautiful.
George would have liked to see the view of the rookery, she thought. His painterly eye would have appreciated its stark beauty. She wished that he would write and let her know where he was and how he was faring. Assuming that he would have joined the Post Office Rifles, she had written to make enquiries but after an age of waiting had received a reply saying that he was not amongst their ranks and that she should try all the local regiments. She had sent out letters; so far to no avail.
Her mother put her fingertips to both temples and rubbed them in slow circles.
‘I’ll get Mrs Burbidge to bring you some lavender water before the doctor comes,’ Violet said. She smoothed back the hair that she had drawn into a neat bun and held up the ebony mirror behind her mother’s head. ‘There,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ her mother said grudgingly. ‘Lavender water would be nice.’
Violet rang for the maid to come and take the tray away, and asked her to take a message to Mrs Burbidge; then she helped her mother back to bed and kissed her on the cheek. She closed the door quietly, her face resuming its customary expression of worry, and retired downstairs to the Small Drawing Room and the relief of being alone and without the need for pretence, to wait out the rain.
George, after having caught the Keswick Coach, the afternoon horse-bus, from the town, walked slowly along the drive to the Manor House. It had taken days to steel himself to make the visit and he felt a deep dread of the duty before him. He was afraid of witnessing Violet’s grief at his news and knew that it would crush him with guilt. Rain drizzled from a grey sky and dripped from the canopy of ancient Scots pine and larch and the glossy leaves of the rhododendron bushes. A gardener with a barrowload of muck crossed the path in
front of him and stared, as if unable to place him in the category of either servant or visitor. As George drew nearer, the man gawped and then wheeled his barrow through a doorway into a walled garden and set it down beside a wide border, half dug over. George had never seen through the door into the garden before and glanced in at the broad lawns. A colonnade ran along one side of the garden, looking out over a bed of roses, towards an ornamental knot garden and a stand of prunus in the foreground, and beyond an orchard and a row of painted beehives. The house was even bigger than he’d thought, with grey slate roofs and many chimneys. The pale stucco walls were finished with red sandstone coigns, the contrast emphasising the building’s solidity. Rows of windows looked out blankly, shaded in deep embrasures.
He saw the trade entrance at the side but walked on until he reached the corner of the house with its fine bay windows and followed the sweep of the drive to a large gravel area, more lawns, then the fields and the lake beyond. He braced himself; he was here to visit Violet and must make sure that he wasn’t fobbed off and turned away. Stepping underneath a wide porch supported by a row of pillars, he straightened the sleeves of his coat. He pulled the white-porcelain bell-pull and heard a chime echo somewhere inside the house; then, noticing that his shoes were mud-splattered, he bent and rubbed each foot with his handkerchief.
Mrs Burbidge answered the door, looking stern in her black, high-necked dress.
George took off his cap. ‘George Farrell, here to see Miss Violet,’ he said.
Mrs Burbidge took in the cap, the overcoat that was slightly too small, the brown shoes worn with black trousers. ‘Is Miss Violet expecting you?’ she asked.
‘She’s not expecting me but I think she would like to see me as I have news of a friend,’ he said carefully.
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