With his usual tact Perry succeeded in turning his mother’s attention to the rest of us.
“Welcome,” she said. Her voice was soft, with a hint of music to it, and I remembered Violet telling me that she was part Welsh. “I hope your journey was pleasant.”
Mrs. Creeley was first to answer.
“Well, if you took away the rain, and that awful cramped ride in your husband’s car (which, by the by, appears to be falling to pieces) not to mention the fact that we’re all fainting from hunger, it would have been passable.”
But she was smiling.
Chapter 18
Those first few days at Ashford were filled with childish adventure for me. Everything was fresh and new, touched with mystery, and for five days I woke up each morning forgetful of the war and its ugliness, thinking only of the day just dawned and the loveliness around me.
With Violet and Perry as guides and companions I rambled about the garden, the village, the fields and the nearby Harridge Woods, not caring for cold or wet, lost to everything but the thrill of discovery. I saw Violet as she must have been growing up there, as a happy little girl, gentle and smiling and ready to follow brother or cousin wherever they led with the boldness of complete trust. I saw Perry, free from professional responsibility, drop the sense of age which he wore in the city, and saw his merry self emerge, full of vibrant youth and high spirits. In turn I found my self-consciousness falling away in their company. I was as open with them as I was closed-off with the Beauforts, more myself than I had ever been, even in those first wonderful weeks of travelling with Gloria, for with her I had always had a vague fear of doing something to incite her disapproval.
Sometimes Gloria joined us in our wanderings, and she was the golden centre of those times as much as she had been in Florence or Nice or Paris, but often she chose to stay in. I knew she was still deeply troubled by what had happened at the hospital, but I had no clear idea of how to help her, how to explain that though she may have failed some great test she had set herself, most people would not judge her harshly for displaying a sign of human weakness, and some, like Violet, would perhaps like her better for her failings. Jerry also joined us from time to time, and I came to know him as a cheerful, easy-going companion, who could always be depended on to say something to lighten the most serious mood, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
There was a ruined mill some way within the woods, a place of dark corners and crumbling damp stones, where we often went, bringing lunch with us, or books to read aloud to each other in the shadows of the mouldering walls. Thanks in great part to the endless curiosity of Mr. Bertram, his interest in and love of all forms of learning, the Ashford library was enormous, completely covering all four walls of the largest room of the house. From that collection we selected whatever struck our fancy, and I found that reading The Mill on the Floss within the ruins of an actual mill buried in woods reminiscent of the Red Deeps, surrounded everywhere by the sound of water, it took more complete control of my imagination than it ever could have within the confines of a house. There, we caught the spirit of it. There, it lived.
The sixth day brought an end to Perry’s time away from London, and we said our good-byes sadly, though we knew he would return before long. That afternoon, after he had gone, Violet and I went out to the ruin and finished what remained of The Mill on the Floss, I reading until hoarseness took me, then passing the book to Violet and so on until we came to the end. On our return, I went up to the room Gloria and I shared with Cyryl and Haline (Violet had a small attic room she loved where she had slept in her childhood) and found Gloria there, putting the wardrobe in order. The room was large, and before our arrival a curtain had been hung down the middle, separating our half from that of the twins so that we all had at least some measure of privacy.
I had not had much opportunity to speak to Gloria alone since the incident at the London pub almost a week before. Our days had been full, and at night we had tumbled wearily into bed, grateful for sleep. Perhaps out of awkwardness we were both avoiding any more than casual conversation.
Our bags were still half packed, though we had been provided with a wardrobe and dresser, and Gloria was in the process of organising the remainder of her things. I joined her, pulling skirts and blouses from my suitcase, shaking them out and hanging them up. She looked round at me and smiled, but said nothing, and her smile still seemed sad to me. I felt a pang of guilt for spending so much time away from her with Violet and Perry, though I told myself that she had had every opportunity to accompany us on any of our excursions. I had never before really felt that she needed me. With her magnetism, her beauty, her engaging presence, I had never thought of her as needing anybody, but now…I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to approach her.
This awkward silence went on for several more minutes. I had my back to Gloria as I sorted through my stockings and put things away into drawers. When I turned, she had pulled something out of her suitcase and was sitting on the edge of her bed looking at it. It was her portrait from Florence.
Mine was still in my bag. I pulled it out and went to sit next to her. It was a conversational opening.
“We never did exchange them,” I said.
“No point now,” she said shortly. “We will probably be here for a while.” From the way she said it I couldn’t tell if she liked the prospect or not. Then she brightened a little.
“We should hang them on the wall,” she said. “It will make it feel more like home.”
There were three pictures hanging on our side of the room: a painting of Windsor Castle, a print of Waterhouse’s “Miranda” and a faded photograph of a boy and girl sitting beside a tree in a field. The girl had long dark hair and a wistful expression and was looking down, away from the camera. The boy was looking forward boldly, laughing.
We hesitated for a moment in front of the pictures, not wanting to disarrange them too much to make way for our own, yet not overly eager to ask permission to bang two more holes in the wall.
“Do we take two of them down, or what?” asked Gloria, as much of herself as of me. “They might be family heirlooms or something, and we wouldn’t want to stick family heirlooms in the back of the wardrobe.”
I shook my head. I liked the splendour of Windsor Castle the least, for it seemed ostentatious, not fitting for Ashford at all. Miranda, looking out at the stormy ocean from the rocky shore of her island home, and the photograph of the boy and girl, were totally at home there. I could not think of moving them. I turned to look for somewhere else to put our portraits, and finally set mine down on top of the dresser.
“What do you think?” I asked Gloria. “At least it solves the wall-space problem.”
“True,” she agreed. “It’s not perfect but it will have to do.”
The dresser was set with its back to the curtain, so there was nothing to lean them against, but we solved this problem in the end by propping them against our hatboxes, which worked well enough, and we stood back to look at them with some satisfaction in our ingenuity.
“He really did a much better job on yours,” said Gloria.
I shrugged. “He did yours first. Maybe it takes a little while for inspiration to hit.”
We were still standing there in the most companionable silence I’d experienced in her company since her return to England when I heard a knock on the open door and turned around to see Jerry waiting outside with a small bouquet of tiny white flowers in a little blue vase. Gloria started a little at the sight of him, and I could tell that apart from her surprise she was still not used to him, so I took it upon myself to smile at him and say, “Come in.”
“Snowdrops,” he said, setting the flowers down on the dresser. “I thought you might like some in your room, and Grandmother told me you were here and I could bring them up.”
I thanked him gladly, touched by his thoughtfulness, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Gloria relax as she added her thanks to mine.
I don’t think he heard us. H
e was transfixed by the portraits on the dresser.
“These are wonderful,” he said, touching the edge of the frames reverently with one finger.
I was glad he liked them, though I thought his enthusiasm a little excessive.
“I try to paint a little myself,” he said, then added a little shyly, “If you would like to see I will show you sometime, but I can never get the faces quite right. I think it’s the colour I don’t get, or maybe the shading.” He pointed at my nose in the portrait, and Gloria’s ear. “The shading here is perfect,” he pointed at a curl of Gloria’s painted hair “and that touch of Burnt Ogre -- it’s genius!”
“What?” I was trying not to laugh.
“Burnt Ogre. It’s a colour, isn’t it?”
He was beginning to sound a little less certain. I heard Gloria whisper, “I think it’s Burnt Ochre.”
I let myself laugh, as I felt that my restraint was becoming too obvious, and said that I didn’t know, but that I supposed a burnt ogre might be that colour. He stopped his perusal of the paintings and looked a little embarrassed, but only for a moment. He was laughing heartily at himself as he left the room, and I could hear him on his way downstairs, saying to himself, “A burnt ogre. It would be, wouldn’t it? A burnt ogre.”
Chapter 19
Was it strange that I felt as though Ashford had been waiting for me? Life with my grandmother had been an extended visit with a beloved but formidable relative. Arriving at Ashford had been more like a real homecoming than anything I had experienced before. That spring was the most beautiful I had ever seen, and I found myself forgetting about the war and its horrors as I watched first the snowdrops, then the daffodils bud, bloom, and fade, saw the new leaves unfold on the trees, and spent hours wandering through the lush young grass of the garden beside the old sundial with its growth of emerald moss.
My time was not, of course, spent solely in meandering through the garden contemplating the seasons. The house was full, and most of us (Mrs. Creeley and Mrs. Beaufort excluded, as their arguments with each other left little time for household tasks) had regular work to do which kept us balanced.
Mrs. Creeley had volunteered me to work in the garden, citing my potato-digging experience, and though I could not help disliking her method of suggestion, I welcomed the task, for it put me out of doors with the smells of spring rain and freshly worked soil, working generally with no one but Mr. Bertram, with whom I welcomed the opportunity to improve my acquaintance.
My liking for Mr. Bertram could only increase with time. He was a genuine, compassionate, earthy sort of man. He liked to get his hands in the dirt. He loved all living creatures. He detested all forms of falsehood. He said little about himself, but this much made itself clear through his actions. Of course, he was not perfect. His temper could flash out quite suddenly if something or somebody offended his sense of right, he could not abide cauliflower in any form, and the only time I saw Lilly Bertram truly emerge from her bubble of dreamy existence was one March afternoon to scold her husband for leaving mud from his boots on the carpet.
In the garden we talked about plants, and he shared with me from his vast knowledge of herb legend and lore, and we arranged an imaginary quest for mandrakes as we dug up the beds in preparation for spring planting. I also became his secondary automotive assistant, after Jerry, who had been his primary helper ever since the vehicle had arrived at Ashford.
It was on a pleasant afternoon in the middle of April that Mr. Bertram said to me, “I should teach you to drive, Anna. It would be a useful thing for you to know, and a help to all of us. Besides, you spend enough time helping me with the old girl that you really ought to have some of the fun as well.”
So our driving lessons began, and though I was nervous at first I found that it came to me much more easily than I had expected. We kept it a secret from everyone but Jerry, Violet, and Gloria, who all enjoyed the secret as much as we did. The lessons were conducted out of sight of the house, and no one let anything slip until the perfect moment, when I drove to Wells to pick Perry up from the station on the occasion of his next visit home in late July.
“I should have known he would have you driving in no time,” he said with a laugh after the first look of surprise had worn off.
“Your father’s a fool to let strange young women drive his car all over the countryside,” was the cheerful remark of Chester Sedgewick, who happened to be passing on his way to the ticket office. “He’ll regret it.”
Perry glowered darkly at Chester’s back for a few seconds, then told me he’d been craving a pastry the whole way from London and couldn’t possibly venture the rest of the way home without one. He fell asleep on the way to the pastry shop, and I had just time enough to start feeling awkward. The joke had been well-played. It had been his father’s idea and it had been successful, but now that it was over I felt like I had no business coming to pick Perry up. I was not family. I had not even known them for very long as knowing people goes. I felt a strange return of self-consciousness, as if my inner being were returning to the shy and silent passenger on the train to Florence, before I had met any of the Bertrams, before the war, before so many things.
I parked in front of the pastry shop and turned off the engine, then leaned my elbows on top of the steering wheel and stared unseeing at the shop’s hanging sign, thinking, while I waited for Perry to wake up.
I didn’t have to wait long. He was soon awake, and teasing me for not rousing him. This familiar treatment put me more at ease, though I think I was quieter than usual, for I caught him looking at me curiously from time to time, as though he knew that something was on my mind. He never asked me what I was thinking about -- he rarely pushed to know anything which anybody seemed at all unwilling to tell -- but he was very kind, entertaining me with talk of the people he met in London and tales of growing up at Ashford, and he bought us both coffee and pastries before we set out again on the drive home.
Once we were under way he asked me about Gloria. He had, it seemed, been concerned about her after he had left us the last time. Violet had told him in confidence the details of that last day in London and Gloria’s eye-opening experience of the hospital.
“I hope she realises that her reaction doesn’t make her weak,” he said, “only human. The other reason I’m concerned is that I had a letter from Tristan a few days ago and he was asking me about her. It seems that before he left they had agreed to write, but he’s only had one letter early on and then nothing.”
I remembered then that Gloria had been receiving letters. I had never asked her who they were from, assuming they came from family and not considering it my place to ask anyway. Our friendship had improved of late, and I had felt that we were nearly back on our old footing, but the truth was our footing had always been that of cheerful companions in good fortune, not of confidants passing through trials together, and she had not spoken to me of Tristan since that day in the pub.
“I’ve been afraid to ask her,” I said, rather amazed at my own honesty, though I should have remembered that Perry had always brought out my blunter side. “She hasn’t said a word about any of that to me since it happened, and I don’t think I have any right to pry.”
Perry considered this for a while, then said, “Maybe she’s embarrassed that you saw her in a weak moment. She seems to me like one of those people who likes to be seen as incredibly strong -- not that that’s a problem. It only means that they become that much weaker when they are caught in a failing that they would never want to admit having, even to themselves.”
It was a view of Gloria’s personality that I had not really considered.
The sky had been clear when I started out, but by the time we left Wells the clouds began to move in and soon a light summer rain began to fall, pattering softly on the roof of the car with a gentle rhythm which made me feel sleepy.
Perry kept me awake and attentive for some time with his stories of working in the city and his news of the war, which had more reality for
me than what I heard in the radio reports ever could. In exchange I gave him the news from Ashford: of how Cyryl had outgrown all his clothes in the space of two weeks, how Jerry had offended Mrs. Beaufort by wandering into her room early in the morning and accusing her of attacking the castle, how Violet and Gloria and I had resumed our Red Cross sewing.
“I don’t think any of us really likes sewing,” I said, “but it’s something to do for the cause. Violet is best at it, of course, she’s so careful.” I hesitated. “I always wish though that I could do something to bring in some money. I don’t want to be a burden on anyone. I know my Grandmother sends enough to support me, but I don’t feel like I should accept it anymore -- not now when everyone needs to do their bit and help each other. I know I do things around the house and I try to make myself useful…but...” I bit my lip. I felt like I was saying too much, but now that the words had begun to flow I couldn’t stop them. “I’ll be twenty on my next birthday, in just a few months. It’s almost two and a half years since we were in Italy. Do you remember that day in the train?”
There was a short silence before I looked over at Perry. He was asleep.
I made a noise to myself which I was glad nobody could hear, something halfway between a laugh and a sob. I didn’t know whether I was more sad or relieved.
I decided that I was relieved, and that Narcolepsy did have upsides after all. Lucky Perry. I wished I could sleep. Through the now-heavy rain I caught sight of a dark object in the road right in front of the car. I swerved to avoid it and thought I had averted disaster when I heard a thud and the depressing sound of air rushing out of a tyre which usually signified a puncture.
Chapter 20
The ridiculousness of it all! I laughed for a few seconds, then in shame leaned my arms on the steering wheel and cried -- then cried more at the stupidity of crying over a puncture. I had been in Paris for the declaration of war. I had seen wounded soldiers walking the streets of London with lost looks, as if the things they had seen had stolen their souls. I had escaped with others from the bombed-out husk of what used to be a house, and I had seen the wreckage of homes all over London. I had seen all these things, and I had wept little or not at all. And now, I was crying over a puncture because it made me look foolish. Did that make me weird or just incredibly selfish?
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