Ashford

by Melanie Rose Huff

  Violet said nothing during the family conclave, but later when I was alone in my room trying to think about packing and everyone else was downstairs challenging each other to a new board game called The Superman Speed Game, she crept up the stairs and knocked at the open door.

  “Who’s winning?” I asked. It was a silly thing Perry had brought home from London on his last visit as a joke, but to the amusement of all us younger set our elders had taken to it with a passion. Mrs. Creeley and Mrs. Beaufort were especially keen on it, and vied with each other with unswerving dedication. It was an amusing spectacle to watch, and usually I followed their progress with as much enjoyment as anyone, but that night I could not feel the usual enthusiasm and had retreated upstairs.

  Violet sat down beside me on the edge of the bed.

  “Grandmother was just ahead when I left,” she said, “but Uncle was coming up close. Mrs. Beaufort isn’t doing too well, but she’s blaming it on the pawns.”

  I smiled. I could imagine everything going on downstairs, and found myself wondering if I would be able to see it all so clearly in my head when I was miles away.

  Violet interrupted my thoughts.

  “You do know I’ll miss you?” she said. “I’m afraid that I haven’t been very good at showing it, but I do like you, a lot. It’s always hard for me to say things -- so much easier to just do things, clean things, get things for people -- but I want you to know, for sure, before you leave. It’s been wonderful having you here, especially with Tristan gone, and I feel like you’re my sister, and I’ll try to like Gloria as much as you do, because I think I love you.”

  The last part came out all in one breath and ended in a gasp. I could see her hands shaking in her lap but pretended not to because I knew she would be self-conscious about it. We were more alike than either of us had thought at first, that was certain. I had to say something.

  “Yes,” I said, “I know. At least, I do now, but I think I suspected before, and I love you like a sister too. I think it started that day at St. Paul’s, but Ashford completed it.”

  I remembered then that I had never given her the postcard I had bought for her that day in town. I pulled it out now and handed it to her.

  “I bought it a while ago,” I said. “Then I forgot to give it to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  She said nothing else, just gave a slow little smile, and we sat there in comfortable silence together until the entrance of the twins erased all chance of quiet.

  It was on the last day, as I stood in my room looking at my packed suitcase, that Mr. Bertram came to find me. He had said little about my going, but had been his usual kind, steady self, and had made the last days of my time at Ashford memorable in so many ways. They were small things, and I could not recall afterwards what they were, not to name or number them, but they were everywhere, in the sights and smells, in every moment of those days.

  He came and stood in the doorway, smiling a little awkwardly, like someone who has something to say but doesn’t quite know how to begin. Again, as he had the first time I met him, he reminded me of Perry.

  He came a little farther into the room, then seemed to notice the pictures on the wall for the first time. He stopped to examine them, and I joined him in front of the wall on which they hung.

  “I haven’t been in this room in a very long time,” he said after a few minutes. He pointed at the painting of Windsor castle. “My aunt painted that, you know. She used to have a great hankering to be an artist, when she was younger.”

  “Really?” It was all I could think to say. The idea of Mrs. Creeley being an artist baffled me, though it seemed right somehow. The straight lines, the almost harsh correctness of it, were like her.

  Since we were discussing pictures, I asked him about the boy and girl in the photograph.

  “Who were they?”

  He looked surprised, then a little rueful.

  “I guess we’ve both changed a great deal, though Lilly still looks like that to me. She was always a wistful-looking thing, and I adored her, even when we were children. The day she said she’d marry me I nearly died of shock, but she was always the one. She was the answer to my question.”

  I didn’t ask what he meant. He seemed to have temporarily forgotten my existence.

  After a few minutes he blinked and came back to me.

  “I didn’t mean to come in here and tell you my life story, Anna. I wanted to tell you that we will all miss you, even Aunt Creeley, though she’d be the last one to let you know it so it’s up to me. I wanted to let you know that you’ll always have a home here at Ashford, and by always I really mean always. Even when this blasted war is over and everything returns to some semblance of normality, we would all be overjoyed for you to come back to us.”

  “Thank you.”

  I thought of my grandmother far away, of her strict kindness, of her house that was the closest thing to home I had known before Ashford, and which was yet no home at all. I hardly knew how I had come here. It was always small steps, chance meetings, threatening catastrophes. A fury had blown me here, it seemed, a pursuing tiger, but it didn’t matter how I had come. I was home.

  I had found home, but in a matter of hours I had to leave it again, and I left in the midst of a flurry of snow. Everyone was very kind, and they all came to the station to see me off. Mrs. Beaufort cried, of course, but everyone else was smiling as the train pulled away from the platform to give me a good send-off, and I worked to memorise my last sight of them. The twins clutched Mrs. Beaufort’s hands and tried to calm her while Mr. Beaufort stood with his hand on her shoulder. The large white flakes of snow were tangled in Gloria’s brilliant hair, sparkling like gems that had fallen there. Violet was wrapped in an old coat of Tristan’s, so much too big for her that her tiny frame was completely lost in it. Mr. Bertram stood between Mrs. Creeley and his mother, his younger son with him, and his wife, her dark hair falling loose around her shoulders, framing her face and its large dark eyes with their look of distant remembering.

  There was one figure missing from the group, but I put him there in my mind, standing beside his mother, saying good-bye. He was still in London. He probably didn’t even know I was leaving yet, and who knew what difference it would make to him if he did, but I saw him still. His hair would be standing up on end, as it had on the train to Florence when he had pulled it while he read the paper, and there would be snowflakes in it.

  Chapter 27

  I was sent to training first, in a smallish industrial town to the North, which left little imprint upon my imagination apart from that of noise and dirt and the smell of rat poison. We were trained by a very brusque older woman whose warty countenance brought to mind the Salem Witch Trials, and whose large, rough hands were often rubbed together when she was explaining things to us, making a loud rasping noise reminiscent of the rats themselves scuttling around a barn floor. She was very fond of drawing parallels between us and the soldiers, between the rats and the Germans, between our poisons and our military’s missiles; in short, between all aspects of our job and that of the boys at the front. She seemed determined to make us the most disciplined, deadly unit in His Majesty’s service, and to do so in the allotted fortnight of our training. We called her The Sergeant among ourselves and forgot her real name, and under her command we spent a fortnight of little sleep and intense work before we were divided into teams and sent off in different directions to be a credit to her teaching.

  The other girls training with me were pleasant enough, but though my self-confidence had grown since I had first arrived on English soil, we were not there together long enough for me to develop anything more than a congenial working acquaintanceship with any of them. I had learned how to make myself approachable. I had not yet learned how to approach. Thus, my friendliness consisted of waiting until I had something to reciprocate, and waiting required time.

  At first I felt scrutinised by the others, though that may have been born out of a certainty that I would b
e scrutinised. I was the only American, and felt that I would seem an oddity, that they might not know whether to accept my efforts in spite of my nationality or to simply wonder what I was doing there.

  It was easier once we had broken off into groups and moved on to our various work locations. Living in a hostel with three other girls, not to mention killing rodents for a living, did not perhaps make for the most comfortable circumstance, but it did promote a feeling of camaraderie between us all. After days spent together in barns and granaries, setting traps and gassing under the floorboards, questions regarding anyone’s reasons for being there became irrelevant.

  It was not a bad life in many ways, despite the unpleasantness of our task. The hostel, though bare, was warm in defiance of the cold without, and the girls were kind and full of fun. On our nights off we would wander down to the pub together and listen to the gossip of the town. There was a prisoners’ camp nearby, and sometimes the news would be that someone had escaped, or been retaken, or that a new batch had been brought in. We sometimes saw the prisoners themselves being transported, Germans and Italians, and in the latter, though I told no one, I always saw the little painter from Florence, with his painting of Il Duce in its place of honour, and thought of his face and how it had brightened at my ignorant display of sympathy.

  Gloria wrote to me often, as did Violet, with occasional notes included from the rest of the family, or pictures drawn by the twins, and I wrote weekly letters home to Ashford, telling of my life and work and asking for news. I addressed them to no one individual, but I began, slowly, to admit to myself that they were all for Perry. Though I knew that he was seldom at home it was he I imagined opening and reading them, and it was for him I included many details which would be lost on most of the others, things that I knew he would find interesting or amusing or touching.

  Gwen wrote to me often as well, sharing many small anecdotes from work on the farm. Little things were rendered comical by her way of writing them, and I could never restrain my laughter when I read her letters, which brought on the curiosity of the other girls, until they awaited her letters as eagerly as I did, and begged me to read them aloud. She had discovered that Old Sedge’s full name was Lionel Victor Sedgewick, so now she occasionally referred to him as Our Victorious Sedge, though she usually shortened his written name to OS or OVS to save time.

  We were all given four days’ leave at Christmas, and I spent a glorious time home at Ashford. Being away had sharpened my enjoyment of it all again, and even Mr. Beaufort’s red face, Mrs. Beaufort’s neuroticism, and Mrs. Creeley’s ungracious remarks were welcome to me as a part of the divine mixture that made that place home. It was wonderful to walk into the kitchen and see Mrs. Beaufort swaying out of time to Ken “Snakehips” Johnson’s “Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind” and crying into the wassail punch. Mrs. Beaufort always cried when Snakehips came on the radio. His death in a bombing raid had shocked everybody, but she had taken it as much to heart as if he had been a family member.

  She always took things harder than anyone else, on principle, and however worked up anyone else became, always managed to work herself up a little bit more. Thus, while the rest of us uttered quite genuine moans over the death of Snakehips, she went into a conniption. She shed exactly one more tear than anyone else when I left for the North, and she rejoiced more eloquently than his own family when the news came that Tristan was coming home.

  For Tristan was returning for a week. He had not taken leave in a very long while, and had at last been commanded to go home at Christmas. When I arrived at Ashford he had already been there for three days, and thus I missed what I had been so curious to see -- the meeting between him and Gloria. She had never told me whether she had or had not taken my advice and replied to his letters, and I imagined that in either case she would be nervous to see him again. By the time I arrived their behaviour towards each other was just what it had been before, and I was pleased to see the familiar flash in Gloria’s eyes and the colour in her cheeks. It was difficult for us to spend much time alone together, with the house so full within and the weather too stormy without for much adventuring, but Gloria pulled me into a corner on the first evening of my return and let me know by a whisper in my ear (if I had any further doubts by then) that all was well.

  It was a wonderful Christmas, and all was well in more ways than one. There were days spent by Gloria, Tristan, Perry, Violet and me by the fire, reading or talking or watching the flames, and there were days, during breaks in the weather, spent out of doors in the fresh cold air of the fields or forests. And all days were perfect, or seemed so. I stored up the memories in much the same way as a squirrel stores nuts, intending to take them out and look them over regularly once I returned to the hostel and the un-picturesque life of a rat-catcher.

  The time passed much too quickly, spent as it was in trying to cram as much as we could into four days, and I was packing again much too soon. Tristan was to leave the same day, as was Perry, so that chilly December morning found the three of us waiting together in the kitchen to say good-bye. We took leave of everyone at once, except for Mr. Bertram, who was to drive us to the station. Mrs. Beaufort cried, and Mrs. Creeley bustled about as she always did when she didn’t want anyone to know that she was upset. Then we all, in silent agreement, stood aside and pretended not to notice while Gloria and Tristan took leave of each other. Their farewell was that of lovers, and I turned away with a lump in my throat that came from sorrow and joy combined. The two are often mixed even in times of peace, but in those days of war they were almost never separated.

  I said good-bye to Mr. Bertram, Tristan and Perry on the train platform, with Chester Sedgewick leering morosely at us all from the ticket office. With such an audience my farewells fell flat on my lips, and I could give only silent replies to the words the others spoke to me, but I squeezed Mr. Bertram’s hand when he gave it to me, shook Tristan’s with a smile, and then, in a momentary burst of uncharacteristic courage, stood on my tiptoes and kissed Perry’s cheek.

  I turned quickly away before I could see his face and hurried onto my train, tripping over my own feet in the process, and fifteen seconds later was mentally kicking myself for being so forward, but it was done, the train was pulling away and it was taking me with it.

  It would be a very long time before I saw Ashford again, or any of those I cared for so much, and before I did many things would change forever.

  Chapter 28

  Returning to rat-catching after Christmas at Ashford was like returning to a dark cave after a sojourn in the sunlight. On my first day back we were sent out to a farm with a rat population as thick as gnats in a mire. Not frightened, furtive rats either, but big, mean rats who didn’t seem to care at all for our size advantage or anything else, so long as they could keep their barn. It became a full-on war, with us yelling battle cries at the rats which would have made the Sergeant proud, and I was very glad that I had never had a great fear of rodents to overcome. One of the other girls, Ella, had, and I could see her hands trembling as she set her traps, though she bore it in true soldierly fashion and never said a word. I tried not to think of it all from the rats’ point of view.

  In the spring of that year the Americans came to set up a camp nearby, and things grew livelier, with music and dancing at the local pubs, and all the things which do come with introducing a new set of young men into a community whose own native sons went away to war long ago. Here I had a trump card in the eyes of my fellow rat-catchers, for I was American myself, and surely, they said, would relate better to these young men than they would, since they were not accustomed to American ways.

  I did not tell them that I had always been a wallflower, or that large groups of young men had a power to frighten me that large hordes of rats did not, or that I was too absorbed in an older civilian Englishman with Narcolepsy to care for any dashing young American soldier. I only smiled, said that I would be happy to do what I could for them, and laughed within myself, for they believed me self-c
onfident.

  Actually, I was surprised by the outcome, for the soldiers, discovering that there was an American with the Land Girls, greeted me as a countrywoman and a sister, and I found myself, on our first meeting, the centre of attention for the first time in my life. It felt odd, as if I were taking something that didn’t belong to me, and I wondered if that were what Gloria must feel, though her place at the centre of the room always came to her by right -- in my case I felt that I had usurped it.

  I did my part by introducing my fellow rat-catchers, nodding and smiling when spoken to, and tapping my toes to the music whenever there was any. There very frequently was music, for many of the young men played instruments, and the girls were always more than willing to dance.

  It was not my element, but it was jolly and lively and helped the time pass. Most of the young men were perfectly happy with my reticence, for it gave them ample opportunities to tell tales of their own, and I was often regaled with stories of battles and glory, though these soldiers were still rather green and had experienced little of the first and even less of the second. Perhaps, had they been more battle-hardened, they would have been less chatty about it. But then, in that case they probably would also have been less entertaining.

  But even the casual friendship of these soldiers brought pain with it as time went on, for the war continued, and there was constant change within the camp. Every so often a group of soldiers would ship out, or a new batch arrive, and all too often we got the news that the Lieutenant I had laughed with a month before, or the Captain with whom Ella had danced, was dead or wounded. And the ones who did return had become more battle-hardened -- and less chatty.