Ashford

by Melanie Rose Huff

  He paused again, and in spite of our new sympathy I wanted to shake him, for he had said as of yet nothing about either Violet or Gloria.

  He cleared his throat again, and when he spoke it was very quietly.

  “Miss Gloria and Violet are gone.”

  Chapter 31

  “Gone? Where?” I still barely grasped what he had said.

  Mr. Beaufort sighed deeply and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief.

  “To London,” he said. “The morning after we heard about Tristan’s death they came downstairs together and told us that they were going to London to pursue more active work with the Red Cross. They looked, both of them, like they hadn’t slept a wink all night. We hoped that maybe they wrote to you. You were close to both of them, and we thought that maybe they would tell you what they wouldn’t tell the rest of us. We’re all worried that they’ll try to go somewhere dangerous, and even though nobody says anything I know everyone’s thinking of the last time Miss Gloria went to a hospital.”

  I could imagine them all when the news came, could feel their grief almost as keenly as I had felt my own. Mrs. Beaufort would have fallen at once into hysteria, doing her anxious husband the favour of keeping his grief at bay by distracting him with her own. Gloria would not have wept until she was alone in the safety of our old room, where the tears could fall unseen and unchecked. Violet alone would be dry-eyed through it all, her sorrow much deeper for the loss of her only brother than appeared from her lack of visible anguish, with nothing to soothe the burning of her dry eyes or the ache of her heart. It was not strange that both Gloria and Violet would be thrown into action by the tragedy, I thought, though for completely different reasons. The strange thing was for them to each find an ally in the other, when their natures were so opposite, their minds and souls so alien. I was glad, if that word could be used, that they turned to each other rather than bearing everything alone.

  I did my best to comfort Mr. Beaufort, telling him that I would let them know if I received a letter, and reassuring him that they would not have gone without some sort of plan, though I was having some difficulty giving myself the same assurance. Finally I reminded him that Perry was in London most of the time, and that with him they would always have a place to go if things did not turn out as they hoped.

  After our meagre repast we fell into silence, and shortly thereafter Mr. Beaufort noticed his own exhaustion enough to seek a remedy by falling asleep on the sofa. He would leave on the evening train, and I found myself wishing he had longer to stay. While my concentration could be focused at least in part on calming his anxiety and keeping his fears for me at bay I had a great deal to do and think about. Once he was gone it would all come back. I would remember what I had just now pushed to the back of my mind, that not only had I lost a friend, but I had also watched by the bedside of a stranger as he drew his last breath. The two were connected for me, melding past and present, near and far into one mass of pain and horror like a leaden mass lying cold at the heart of the empty hull which was my body. From some distance in my mind a Frenchwoman wept for her two dead sons, and my heart cried for her loss as well as for mine.

  I walked Mr. Beaufort to the train station in the late afternoon, he boarded the train and was gone. I was alone. Alone with my leaden mass and the ghosts of not two men but four, and I found myself speaking to them, reaching out to the dead for comfort because they suddenly seemed more real and present to me than the living.

  Then the girls came home with their questions and concern, and the loneliness, instead of growing less, only became greater and more overwhelming, for in the presence of the living the nearness of the dead faded away but the nearness of the living was only that of the body, not of the soul. I answered their questions as concisely as I could, and left them as quickly as I was able in spite of their pressing invitation for me to join them for dinner at the inn. I had no appetite, I told them, and would be poor company in any case. I did not say that under the circumstances their presence only increased my feelings of desolation.

  The next day work began again, and I was able to find some solace in the regularity of our routine, though I went about my work silently and seldom joined in the conversations of the others.

  I also discontinued my evening visits to the hospital, at first because I felt that I could not bear it after the recent events, then later out of fear, though I felt guilty whenever the door of the hostel shut behind the others on their way there. They never questioned me, and were very kind, but I imagined what they must be thinking, and my overactive fancy made great what was little and increased my shame by dwelling on what I considered their thoughts of me might be.

  I did at last receive a letter from Violet, with a short note from Gloria enclosed, to inform me that they were safe and well, and to apologise for not writing sooner. It was kindly written, in such a way as to allay my fears, yet I felt that it told me nothing.

  They were in London. They were safe. As safe as could be expected. They were doing Red Cross work, though neither said exactly what that work was. They had seen Perry several times and he would take care of them if anything were to happen. I was not to worry, and I was requested to reassure the rest of the family at Ashford to the best of my ability.

  I replied to the letter, asking for more information about their work, and assuring them that I understood their reasons for leaving, though it would be difficult to obey their instructions and not worry. London was still a war zone, after all, and I didn’t know where in London they were or how dangerous their task was. I sent the letter to Perry’s town address, knowing that he would pass it on to the girls for me, and included a brief note for him asking that he keep me informed of their welfare.

  I did not expect a visit from him, but he came. One drippy evening in mid-February, when I returned from that day’s rat-catching, he was waiting at the hostel. The place seemed full of an unaccustomed warmth as we came in the door and I felt his presence before I saw him -- felt it as a lightening, a restfulness, a serenity within myself that I had thought lost, gone into the next world with the men who had died. I knew that I had missed him, but I only knew how much when I saw him there. His familiar smile was just as ready, but not quite as I remembered it. It was, perhaps, a little sadder, but just as kind, just as all-encompassing, reaching out not only to me but to the girls with me so that we were all enveloped by it in spite of our end-of-the-day weariness. I altered the picture of him in my mind to add that new sadness to his smile, so that the portrait should be as accurate as it could be, then stepped forward to welcome him and introduce him to the others, feeling a little anxious underneath the serenity owing to my impulsiveness on the occasion of our last parting.

  “I’m surprised to see you,” I said, when we had sat down. The girls, after a few short minutes of polite conversation, left us alone together at the kitchen table and went to change out of their dirty rat-catching clothes. I wanted to change out of mine, for I felt mousier than usual in them, not to mention the surrounding pungent haze of poison fumes, but felt I must hear any urgent news he brought first. My thoughts, of course, went quickly to Violet and Gloria. Had anything happened to them? I asked him.

  “No,” he said, and I felt a great deal of the weight I had been carrying fall from me at his utterance of that monosyllable.

  “They were very well when I left London,” he said. “I don’t hear much of their work, but I know that Violet is a nurse’s aid, and Gloria does anything the Red Cross sees fit to ask of her. Is it so hard to believe that I would come to visit you just to see that you were well, without bringing bad news with me?”

  It was hard for me to believe, but I didn’t say so. Instead I mumbled something indistinct about everybody being on edge these days, just waiting for disaster, and that I was no different. It was true, so what matter if it were not the whole reason behind my anxiety?

  “And how are you?” he asked, looking at me as if he could see into me and knew the answers before I gave them.
“How are you really?”

  I told him. I told him all of it. All, except of course that I was in love with him, which was wound and balm at the same time. Even to Mr. Beaufort, who had found me at the bedside of a dead man, I had not told the details of that Christmas night at the hospital. Now it came flooding out, all my fear and uncertainty, the courage which had come to me that night only to be replaced by a benumbing chill which had not left me since.

  “I haven’t even gone back to the hospital since then,” I confessed. “It’s cowardly and I know it. I know I should go back, but I can’t get up the nerve.”

  Perry smiled at me across the table, and again the smile was mixed with a greater melancholy, though there was a calm behind it which I could not remember seeing before. He had always kept everyone merry, but I could not recall that sense of tranquility. He reached out and put his hand over mine which lay on the table.

  “I know we have never talked about that night in the rain,” he said unexpectedly, “but I want you to know that you helped me more than I think you had any idea of. I was miserable and weak then, and you were the strong one. You gave me the courage I lacked to face myself. War has a way of bringing out the best and the worst of people by turns, I think. Let me be the strong one now, and help you.”

  The calm. The tranquility. So he had faced the fiends which had haunted him and come out stronger. The young man in the wheelchair. An umbrella dropped in the mud. A green bright morning and a small pile of blackberries.

  I wanted to say that he had helped me. That he had helped me more than anyone else. That I considered myself in his debt already. But I felt that I could not speak without shedding tears, and I refused to cry. There was no friendly rain shower here to disguise the fact, as there had been that night in the lane. I managed a watery smile, and I squeezed his hand and nodded. It seemed enough.

  A death. Bloodstained hands. A rat-catcher’s party dress pushed hastily to the back of a closet. And perhaps one day soon another green bright morning?

  “Now we will forget about the war for a while,” he said, and the world brightened around us. “I can’t stay long, but while I do there will be no sadness.”

  He insisted on treating us all to dinner at the inn that night, and he was warm and kind, and I began to feel the life returning to me in response to the life in him, like a seed under the frozen ground feels the spring approaching and turns towards it. I accompanied him to the train station early the next morning, and before he left he said to me, “Remember, Anna, that you are not alone.”

  Then he bent his head to kiss my cheek.

  Chapter 32

  The next evening I went back to the hospital with the others, and it was not the ordeal I had expected and feared, but a return to something which felt right and familiar. The other girls and the nurses welcomed me back and said how glad they were to see me there again, but they asked no questions about why I had been gone, and I had begun to pull myself enough out of my self-pity to know why. They all knew why I had not been there because most of them had been through as great or greater trials than I had. Some had lost brothers, fathers, husbands or sweethearts. How thoughtless had I been in my own sorrow, that I had forgotten theirs?

  I remembered years ago, how I had looked out of a hotel window in Florence and thought happily of the linking-together of all humanity. It no longer seemed a happy thing, but we were, if anything, more linked now in our suffering and our endurance of it than ever before. I thought of the little Italian painter who had so idolised his great leader, and wondered what had become of him, if he was still alive. Whatever his fate he was there in my mind, together with a French woman who wept for her sons. My early musings on the connection of humankind had been untried, the wandering thoughts of a girl who had never suffered tragedy beyond the deaths of her parents so early in her childhood that she barely remembered them. They had been tried since then. I thought they had been broken, but instead it seemed that I had been shaken awake from a deep sleep to find them not shattered but realigned into a different pattern. It was not quite the same as I had thought before, not quite so golden, not quite so flawless, yet it held. We were bound. We stood or we fell, together. In the standing there was a great triumph, in the falling a great fear, and for the last several years, we, all of us, had been slipping down the edge of a huge crater.

  In April we were informed that women were being allowed to enlist in the Home Guard, and I was not surprised when Violet sent me the news that Gloria had joined up. It was more like her than doing odd jobs for the Red Cross, and, with Hitler choosing to march to disaster in the East for the present, it was not a great deal more dangerous than just living in London.

  It was in June that Violet wrote to ask leave to come see me. I said yes of course, only saying that there was no need to ask and she would be welcome at any time. I had missed her a great deal, her quiet manner and honest eyes, and I had worried about her daily since the news of Tristan’s death.

  She did not come at once, and I began to think she had changed her mind, but then in early July she wrote to say she was coming the following week. I wondered if Gloria would come with her, though she had said nothing. It would be good to see them both. It would be good to see only her.

  She came alone, and I hardly recognised her when she stepped out onto the platform at the station. She looked so much older, so much more self-assured. I told myself that it was only natural. I had not seen her since she left Ashford. She had grown up. She stood among the men and women on the platform as their equal, no longer a trepidatious young thing with wide eyes. I barely know her anymore, I thought. But then she caught sight of me, and the familiar slow, shy smile came over her face, and I saw the old Violet under the skin of this new young woman.

  “It was good of you to meet me,” she said, coming to give me a hug.

  I was still in my rat-catching clothes from the day’s work, and apologised for the smell of chemicals and ratty death on my person.

  She laughed.

  “I’ve smelled as bad or worse in the last few months,” she said. “London smells simply awful these days.”

  I imagined it did, and had to admit that I preferred my life and the temporary stench of rat-catching from which I could later escape into the fresh air, to hers of stone and cement, death and smoke and unremitting reek. So, I reflected, would she. She had not chosen the path she followed now out of love for life in a city of ashes.

  I took her back to the hostel and introduced her to the girls, but it was not long before we left for a ramble over the hills.

  It was a perfect summer evening, warm and still, and we wandered in the lanes and fields until long after dark, enjoying the quiet beauty of it all. A nightingale sang in the distance. A dog barked. A shy hedgehog poked its nose out from under a nearby shrub, saw us, and turned into a spiny ball with eyes. We had left the town behind us and were climbing over a stile into a wide green field when Violet stopped at the top and let out a long sigh.

  She was looking out over the landscape with an expression that, for reasons I could not understand, made me want to cry, though it was not sad itself. It was a look, I thought, of love and farewell, and I remembered her adoration of Ashford and the country. Life in devastated London must be hard for her. True, we had all lived there for a time, but that was at the beginning, before the smoking piles of rubble became sights as familiar as intact buildings and streets.

  “Anna,” she said, not looking at me but still out over the country. “Anna, I’m going away.” She paused, and I looked up at her from my place on the ground, but said nothing. I found that I was holding my breath, and I made myself let it out, slowly.

  “I’m going to France.”

  Why did I not feel the surprise I felt I should? It was not that I had thought she might do this. I had not considered it. But when she told me, it seemed so like her. I opened my mouth, thinking I would beg her not to go, but all that passed my lips was a question.

  “How soon?”
r />   She looked at me then with a half-smile, and with a pang I realised she was giving me the same look she had given the landscape.

  “I only waited to see you. I leave in two days. It’s an under cover mission I’ve been training for. I can’t talk about it.”

  I must have looked the question I was thinking, because she shook her head and went on.

  “No, I haven’t been to Ashford. I couldn’t. If I went back I know I would never leave. They don’t know about my going. I knew I could trust you to not try to stop me.”

  I wanted to try to stop her. Wanted to, but couldn’t. She trusted me, and the resolute look in her eyes told me it would do no good in any case. I remembered that expression. I had seen it before. Timid she might be, but when that look came over her she did not waver. How had she known that I would not try to stop her? If that were true she knew me better than I did.

  I was still standing there staring up at her as she stood at the top of the stile, though I only realised it when she moved to join me on the far side.

  “Let’s not talk about it any more now,” she said. “I want only good memories to think about when I go away.”

  She wanted images to keep and carry to France with her in the same way I had carried mine of Ashford at Christmas back to my rat-catching. How could I refuse her what I had so clung to? I nodded my agreement and asked no more questions.

  We must have walked many miles that night, watched over by a thin sliver of moon which kept disappearing and reappearing between bits of cloud that occasionally showered us with light bursts of warm summer rain. We said no more of France or her going. We said nothing of the war. Sometimes we would speak of Tristan, but always as he was before, of his and Violet’s childhood together, of his time at university. We spoke of Perry, of the Beauforts and Mrs. Creeley and Mr. Bertram. We talked of Ashford -- its smell, its warmth, its sense of history and peace.