Belle was silent. She was back in her father’s study, lying on the Turkey rug and gazing up at the huge old oil painting of a snowbound Strathnaw. Pestering Papa with questions about robins.
That scene was so vivid in her mind. It was like looking down the wrong end of a kaleidoscope, and watching the tiny, brilliantly coloured shards, impossibly far away.
‘Your grandfather Ainsley,’ Sophie went on, ‘used to come here in the school holidays. As did your father.’
‘Papa? Papa came here?’
‘But you knew that, surely? My grandfather – Jocelyn Monroe – he adopted your father when he was orphaned as a child.’
‘Oh, I knew about that. I just didn’t know that he ever came to Strathnaw.’
‘Well, here’s something else that perhaps you didn’t know. This is where your parents first met.’
Belle stared at her.
‘Your mother was ten years old. Came here in the middle of winter on some secret errand of her own, and saw your father down there by that statue. He was on a white horse, standing so still that for a moment she thought he was a statue himself.’ She paused. ‘Apparently he wore a long grey cloak which she found impossibly dashing.’
‘You said she was a child.’
‘And he was a young officer about to go out to the Sudan. After that, they didn’t meet again for years. Not till we moved to Jamaica.’
‘Sophie,’ said Belle in a low voice, ‘why are you telling me all this?’
Sophie glanced at her. ‘It’s a little hard to explain. But I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day; about your having done something when you were younger that prevents your being with Captain Palairet.’
Belle felt the familiar hot, prickling sensation that told her someone was getting too close.
‘I’ve no idea what you meant,’ went on Sophie, ‘and since you’re not inclined to tell me, I shan’t ask again. But looking back, it does seem to me that it explains why you’ve never been home. You’re running away, aren’t you?’
Belle began to feel breathless. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Yes you do,’ Sophie said gently. ‘You’re running away. Goodness, I ought to know. I tried it once myself.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Of course not. Just another one of my mistakes.’ She hesitated. ‘None of which answers your question: why did I bring you here?’ She turned her head and gave Belle her bright, observant stare. ‘Our family has strong roots, Belle. The Monroes. The Lawes. They go back a long way – here in Scotland, and out in Jamaica. Forgive me for lecturing you like this – I always loathe it when people do it to me – but I can’t see you going wrong without saying something. You can’t keep running away. The family, Jamaica, Eden. It’s part of who you are. You can’t run away from yourself.’
‘No,’ agreed Belle. ‘But you can become someone else.’
Sophie gave a wry laugh. ‘Oh, you’re impossible! You sound just like your mother!’
Sophie wanted to go back and retrieve the motor-taxi and drive on to the house, but Belle put her foot down. ‘I don’t want to go inside,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen Strathnaw, and you’ve given me your lecture. That ought to be enough.’
Sophie realized that she meant it, and gave in. ‘I suppose I can’t blame you. I’ve never liked sanatoriums either. And I’ve always found this one particularly intimidating. It’s officers only, so there’s a rule that all the nurses must be ladies.’ She pulled a face. ‘They’re all desperately pretty, and desperate for husbands.’
Belle thought of Felicity Ruthven.
‘Apparently,’ Sophie added drily, ‘it’s a marvellous place for courting. Before the war they had dances; now they have sans.’
‘But some of the officers are very ill, aren’t they?’
‘Oh, heavens yes. Tremors, mutism, memory loss. But those poor fellows just give the nurses the chance to appear angelic in front of the more able-bodied patients.’
Belle smiled. ‘Goodness, you’re cynical.’
Sophie laughed.
They turned and started walking back through the trees.
Sophie became thoughtful again. At last she said, ‘There’s another reason why I wanted you to see the san.’
Belle turned to her, wondering what was coming next.
‘In a couple of days, I shall be going back to Flanders. I was hoping you’d have second thoughts, and make things up with Captain Palairet. But clearly that isn’t going to happen.’
Belle flinched.
‘Where will you go, Belle? You can hardly go to Berkeley Square now that poor Sib . . . What will you do? Shall you go home to Eden?’
‘No,’ Belle said quickly.
‘Then where? I’m sorry to press you, but I think I must. I can’t just leave you.’
‘Yes you can.’
‘No. I cannot.’
Belle turned and walked on a few paces. She’d been wondering about this herself, but so far she hadn’t progressed beyond a vague plan of staying with Dodo for a while.
She had no family in England other than Sophie, and no occupation. She had money, Papa had always seen to that – but as an unmarried girl of twenty, she could hardly set up home on her own without putting herself for ever beyond the pale. The War might have changed things immeasurably, but not to that extent.
‘We could use you in Flanders,’ said Sophie. ‘Plenty of hospitals, of course; less glamorous than Strathnaw, but they might suit you better. Or you could come and help me in the GRC.’
‘Planting shrubs. Yes, I suppose I could manage that.’
‘We need more help than just planting shrubs.’
‘Such as what? I wouldn’t be able to do anything else.’
‘Nonsense. I’ve already had one or two ideas.’
‘What do you mean?’
Sophie shrugged. ‘Nothing I’d care to go into just yet. The point is, will you come?’
Belle thought for a moment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you, but no.’
Sophie did not press her further, and they drove back to Newton Stewart in companionable silence. When they reached the hotel, Sophie went upstairs to write letters, and Belle went outside for a walk.
It was getting dark, and as she wandered the little streets that were only dimly lit by blue-painted street lamps she attracted curious glances from shopkeepers drawing down their blinds. She ignored them. Walking in the dark helped her think.
Damn Sophie for being so shrewd; for reminding her of where she came from.
Rose Durrant, her grandmother, had given up everything to be with the man she loved. She’d thrown away her good name and followed him halfway across the world. Sophie herself had defied society to marry Ben, and as a result had permanently shut certain doors against her. Even for Mamma, there had been sacrifices and heartbreak, although Belle didn’t know the details. Compared to all that, what were her own doubts and misgivings?
Turning it over in her mind, she walked on. But the more she thought about it, the more certain she felt that nothing had changed. She could never bring herself to tell Adam the truth. She couldn’t risk watching his face change as he realized that she was not the woman he believed her to be.
It was after seven by the time she returned to the hotel. She expected to find Sophie dressed for dinner and awaiting her impatiently in the lounge, but she wasn’t. The clerk said that he hadn’t seen Mrs Kelly since they’d come in from their drive. Some letters had arrived for her in the afternoon post, including (he couldn’t help but notice) an official-looking one from the Front.
With a twinge of alarm, Belle mounted the stairs to their suite.
As soon as she opened the door of their sitting room, she knew something was wrong. The fire had been allowed to burn low, and the lamp on the table was guttering. Sophie sat in the half-darkness, clutching a letter. Her hair was awry. There were traces of tears on her cheeks.
‘Oh God,’ said Belle. ‘Ben.’
Sophie turned her
face and looked up at her as if she was having trouble focusing. ‘Missing in action,’ she said.
Part Three
Chapter Thirty
Flanders, 11th November 1918
The War had ended that morning, and Arthur Winsloe was taking it personally.
He’d got his blighty at the battle of Lys, and returned home to find that his wife had gone off with another man: a catastrophe he liked to describe in blinding detail to anyone who would listen. Adam didn’t always listen, but he didn’t walk away, so Winsloe had attached himself, and could not now be shaken off.
‘Bloody Armistice,’ he said bitterly as they drove out of Ypres, the lorry lurching over the ruts. ‘Too bloody late for me. If only she’d waited. I told her it’d be over soon.’
‘I thought she left you back in April,’ said Adam, swerving to avoid a cat. In the rear-view mirror he saw it walk calmly to the edge of the road, and curl up on a fragment of shell casing.
It was a peaceful sight on a beautiful, clear autumn afternoon. Hostilities had ceased four hours before. The stillness took Adam’s breath away.
‘But if she’d known how soon it would end,’ Winsloe insisted, ‘she wouldn’t have left. If only the bloody Boche had caved in weeks ago, when they ought to have done . . .’
Adam stopped listening. Every time he came this way, he remembered how it had looked at the start of the War. At this point the road used to cut through the medieval ramparts, and in 1914 they’d been green and blowsy with trees, and guarded by two splendid stone lions who sat on their haunches like large, sleepy house cats. Beyond the ramparts, as one headed into town, the road had narrowed as it passed between tall Flemish houses with stepped brick gables, then on towards the proud old Cloth Hall and the magnificent cathedral.
Now the ramparts were gone, the cathedral lay in ruins, and the shattered skeleton of the Cloth Hall reared stark against the sky. The lions had long since been blasted to oblivion. Adam wondered if they would be replaced, now that peace had come. Peace. It was too huge to take in. He gave up trying, and concentrated on driving.
They rattled over tramlines and light railways intersecting the road; past the railway yard, and on towards the hamlet of Dickebusch – or rather, towards the pile of rubble which corresponded to that name on the map. Again Adam was struck by the stillness. There were people about – farmworkers in clogs pulling hand carts, and little parties of soldiers – but they moved slowly. Everyone seemed subdued.
That morning they’d stopped at a café on the outskirts of Ypres – a café, Adam had thought in disbelief, having once again to remind himself that the front line was now beyond Mons, forty miles to the east.
With Winsloe and half a dozen others, he’d sat in the sunshine, listening to some desultory anti-aircraft fire to the north. Then, at ten to eleven, a furious outburst of shelling had opened up in the distance.
An officer of fusiliers had said that it must be a battery getting rid of its shells, in order to avoid having to lug them about.
‘Bit rough on the Huns,’ another man had remarked, and there had been a general murmur of agreement.
The shelling had lasted until the clock in the café struck eleven, when it had abruptly ceased. The silence which followed was palpable.
Sitting there in the crisp autumn sunshine, Adam had been conscious only of a vast anticlimax. The same feeling was mirrored in the faces around him. There was no cheering, and no hurrahs.
‘That’s it, then,’ someone had said.
Then everyone had gone back to their coffee.
And yet, in the hours that followed, word had filtered through that all over England, towns and villages were going wild.
‘Well, let them,’ Winsloe said bitterly. ‘Leave the celebrations to the people back home. They don’t know the reality.’
But what reality? thought Adam as he slowed to make way for a farmer’s wagon which had lurched out from a side track. London, the influenza, Cairngowrie, Belle – it had all been a dream. He’d never really left the Front.
Although, of course, that was just another illusion. He was no longer in uniform; no longer with his unit. He was with the GRC.
Like Winsloe, he’d wangled his way back to the Front by arguing his intimate knowledge of the region and familiarity with the vagaries of military record-keeping, to land a position in Graves Registration.
So here he was, scarcely ten days after Belle had stepped onto the train at Stranraer, helping to sweep an area from Ypres to Bailleul twelve miles to the south-west: shuttling between basic accommodations in shattered hamlets, where they had to compete with returning farmers and a trickle of grieving relatives, and GRC headquarters in an elegant château just outside Saint-Omer, twenty-five miles to the west.
The task sounded simple enough. Survey the terrain with the aid of mud-spattered (sometimes blood-spattered) records; disinter what could be found; deliver to sorting stations or cemeteries – themselves often bleak, muddy sites still marked out with ropes, where men struggled to erect ranks of wooden crosses in the autumn gales – so that the ‘travelling garden parties’, as they were affectionately known, might do what they could to prettify things with turf and shrubs before the War ended, and the trickle of mourners swelled to a flood.
‘We’re putting on a show, d’you see,’ an official had told Adam on his first day. ‘Scurrying about, turning mud into gardens, before the visitors arrive.’
They had to find their way through a land largely without roads; past pulverized bridges, and hamlets that had long since ceased to be anything more than marks on a map. The terrain was like a moonscape: riven by abandoned trenches, bristling with thickets of barbed wire, pitted with mine craters, and studded with shell casings. Sometimes they came across pockets of still-lethal gas, and had to beat a hasty retreat. Sometimes they stumbled on unexploded shells protruding from the mud, and had to summon one of the detonation parties which toured the region, touching off discarded ammunition.
It was hard, exhausting, dangerous work. Which suited Adam perfectly. This was why he’d left Cairngowrie. To bury himself in something all-consuming. Something that would stop him thinking.
Winsloe, however, was becoming a problem. He was drinking too much, and talked constantly of his wife. He was also acquiring a reputation for recklessness.
‘Got a death wish, that one,’ an ex-sergeant had confided to Adam only the day before. ‘You watch out, sir. See that package in his greatcoat pocket that he keeps pawing? That’s a revolver, you mark my words. If a live shell don’t get him, he’ll blow out his bloody brains one of these days. No, sir, you watch yerself. Me? I wouldn’t go with him for a pension.’
But the ex-sergeant was wrong, Adam was sure of it. Poor Winsloe was the sort who never did more than talk.
They drove through la Clytte, then Dranoutre, where they picked up a party of diggers. Half a mile north-east of the village of Bailleul, Adam turned left onto a track, and pulled up. According to his notes, there should be two clusters of temporary interments about a thousand yards apart, between a strongpoint from the previous year’s defences, and a pair of old machine-gun emplacements.
He cut the engine, and the stillness descended. It was so intense that it made his ears throb. He sat for a moment, taking it in, while the men in the back jumped out and stood in the sunshine, chatting in low voices as they lit cigarettes.
‘If only she’d waited,’ Winsloe said bitterly.
Adam shut his eyes.
‘No faith. That’s women. They tell you they love you, then they trample all over you.’
Adam thought about Belle – who had never, it occurred to him now, actually told him that she loved him. And if she’d ‘trampled all over him’, as Winsloe put it, it had only been by mistake.
And yet, he did feel trampled. The pain was far worse than it had been with Celia: a physical ache in his chest that never left him. It was why he’d come to Flanders.
But why had she left? What was that self-destructive
spark which now and then seemed to flare up inside her and scorch everything to destruction?
He knew that it had to do with what she’d told him about Traherne, but he didn’t understand exactly how. And he’d lied when he’d said that it didn’t matter. What he should have said was that he could foresee a time when it would not.
‘I begged her to stay,’ Winsloe said resentfully. ‘I begged her.’
So did I, thought Adam. He regretted that now. Perhaps after all he was not so different from poor Winsloe: endlessly going over things he couldn’t solve, endlessly angry. Although whether he was angry with Belle or with himself, he couldn’t tell.
He was just so bloody sick of thinking about it all the time.
So it was as well to be here, poring over a map spread on the dashboard, instead of home at Cairngowrie. Max and Maud were better off without him. And as Traherne had been called away to London on business, he was unlikely to cause trouble – although if he did, Adam had left instructions with Maud and his lawyers to wire him at once.
‘I bet she’s celebrating,’ muttered Winsloe, fingering his greatcoat pocket. ‘I bet she’s happy.’
‘Winsloe,’ said Adam with his eyes on the map, ‘what’s the point in talking about it?’
Winsloe ignored him. ‘They’re all whores,’ he muttered.
Adam raised his head and shot him a look.
Winsloe glared at him defiantly. He was a wiry redhead with a pinched face, and pale eyelashes which distantly evoked a grown-up Max; although Max, reflected Adam, had more backbone than poor Winsloe ever would.
‘Whores the lot of them,’ said Winsloe. ‘It’s in their nature. Even the young ones.’
‘Now you know that’s not true,’ Adam said wearily. ‘What about your daughter? What’s her name, Alice? How can a twelve-year-old be a whore?’
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 108