Hurriedly straightening the creases I had created in the skirts of the gown, I hastened to the ballroom only to find the space already filled up with people.
The only person close to my own age that I recognized there was Minerva Clarence. But there were at least a dozen young men, scattered amongst the adults, I didn’t recognize at all.
“Who are all these boys?” I asked Mother, having located her.
“Don’t you recognize any of them?” She looked surprised. “They are family to our friends, friends to our friends.”
“No,” I said. “I have never seen any of them in my life.”
“Surely you must know him.” With a slight jut of the chin, so as not to rudely point, she indicated a blond boy standing in the corner. He looked amiable enough, but he was a sloucher. “That is Mary Williams’s nephew, James.”
“If I had met any nephews of Mary Williams, I am certain I would remember it.”
“Oh? Then how about him?” Another chin jut. “Alistair Roman’s much younger cousin, Arthur.”
Arthur Roman had dark sideburns so thick, they looked like they might be part of a theatrical costume, and a chin that looked like he used it for a chisel.
“I do not know him either.”
Nor did I know Bertram, Cecil, Cyril, Edward, Ernest, Garnett, Harry, Ransom, Thomas, or Victor, although Mother took great pains to detail for me their connections to various adults there.
“It is wonderful to know the lineage of everyone present,” I said, unable to mask my sarcasm, “but what I don’t understand is why they are all here in the first—”
But I did not get to finish asking my question, because someone had tapped tentatively on my shoulder.
I turned to find that the tentative tapper had been James Williams, who was now bowing down low.
“Miss Sexton? I wonder if I might have the pleasure of this dance?”
James Williams was not half so good a dancer as Kit, and I could feel the sweat of his palm bleed through the fabric of my dress, but it did feel nice to be whirled around the ballroom. At the very least, it was good exercise. And when he stepped on my toes, I tried not to let the grimace show on my face.
“I say,” he said, “this is a rather lively tune. I always think that if there must be music, let it at least be lively.”
“Yes,” I could not help but agree, if only to have something to say. “That does sound like a good policy.”
No sooner did I finish dancing with James than Arthur Roman came to tap on my shoulder.
“Have you read any good books lately?” I asked, hoping to have a more fruitful conversation than my last one as he slowly waltzed me around as though the only shape one could dance in was a very small box.
“Books? Hmm.” Arthur Roman cleared his throat, eyes on his own feet, the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips whenever he was not speaking. “I try never to read books unless I absolutely have to.”
When Thomas—or was it Victor?—came to tap on my shoulder next, I did not even try to engage him in fulfilling conversation, only answering his feeble queries with monosyllables as I bided my time, waiting for the music to end.
Despite more young men asking me to dance, I pleaded the need to eat. Alongside the buffet that had been set up, I found Minerva Clarence, tapping her dainty little foot in time to the music.
“Do your parents always throw parties like this,” she asked, “with so many young men?”
“Not in memory,” I said wryly, helping myself to a plate of food I did not want before one of the young men I’d just refused could ask me to dance again.
“I had the devil of a time getting away,” Minerva said, her cheery tone belying the frustration in her words. “Dora would not go to sleep until I finally promised to bring her back a treat. Do you think your parents will object if I take her one of the little cakes?”
I pictured her in her pretty aquamarine gown, borrowing a linen napkin in which she’d wrapped a tiny sliver of cake to take home to her youngest sister; or better yet, concealing it in the satin folds of her skirts, not minding if the icing ruined her gown. I was forced to admit, grudgingly, that Kit was right: she was indeed a nice girl.
“No.” I shook my head. “I am certain they will not mind.”
“So many young men here,” she said again, delightedly, as though we were surveying the treats upon the table.
But none of them are the right young man, I thought.
“That one with the bristly dark mustache,” she said. “He is handsome, is he not?”
I could not recall if the one she was indicating was called Cecil or Cyril, nor did I much care.
“If you think that,” I said, moving on, “then you are welcome to him.”
“I do think that it is going well, Martha, don’t you?” I heard Mother ask as I came up behind her.
“Oh, yes,” Aunt Martha said. “It is exactly as—” Then she caught sight of me over Mother’s shoulder and reddened, scurrying away as best a person could scurry away with a cane.
“Mother, what is going on? And why are not the Tylers here tonight? At least if Mrs. Tyler were here, I might ask her if she has received any letters yet from Kit.”
“Kit,” she said. “You always talk of Kit.” She looked sour, but then her eyes suddenly glittered with satisfaction. “You cannot tell me you are not having a good time. I am sure I saw you dancing every dance. It certainly looked to me as though you were enjoying yourself.”
“It does not matter if I was enjoying the dancing!” I said. And then it hit me. “The Tylers not being here—there was a deliberate decision not to invite them, wasn’t there?”
“Well, I don’t know about deliberate.” She looked flustered now. “But I did think it would be more enjoyable for you to meet some new young men if they were not present.”
“You thought?”
“Why, yes. Aunt Martha and I both agreed, what with Kit gone now, it would be a welcome diversion, that it would be good for you to enlarge your social circle.”
“But I don’t want a diversion! I don’t want to enlarge my social circle!”
“Lucy.” Her whisper might have been a shouted command. “Lower your voice, this instant.” Her expression softened, taking on an almost begging quality. “You must be reasonable, Lucy. Kit is gone now, and it may be years before he comes back. I do not want to be the one to say so, but it is entirely possible that he may never come back.”
I did not understand it, did not recognize this Mother.
Why had she changed so? Why had her relationship to me changed so? She never would have dismissed Kit’s importance in my life so cavalierly before, as if one person could just as easily be replaced with another, as if he could ever be replaced. She had met and married my father almost immediately when she was not much older than I was now. Could anything have dissuaded her from that path, that love? I liked to think not. And yet, apparently, she thought that as soon as Kit was removed from the picture, out of the country, I should be content to move on. It was almost as though she did not want him to come back, I thought wildly. It was almost, my mind raced yet more wildly still, as though she wanted me to meet someone else quickly, so that I might sooner be gone.
I had never been so angry with her in my life.
“He will come back,” I said, willing tears of anger and fear not to spring to my eyes, not in front of her, not now, not here. “He will come back.”
• Thirty-one •
At last—at long last!—letters from Kit began to arrive.
It was too bad, then, that the first one opened:
Dear Minerva …
“What is he doing writing to you?” I demanded when she came by the house to show me the letter that had come to her.
She looked perplexed at my question, perplexed at my anger too, causing her to respond with the counterinterrogatory, “Because, before he went away, he said he would?”
“Yes,” I pressed, “but why is he writing to you first? I
don’t believe even his mother has received a letter yet!”
She looked puzzled by this as well. “Perhaps because C comes before S and T in the alphabet? You know, Clarence does come before Sexton and Tyler.”
“What kind of schooling did you receive?” I raised my eyebrow witheringly at her, a gesture I had learned from Mother.
Of late, I had noticed Mother using that gesture increasingly on my father whenever she found something he said to be in some way lacking.
“I am quite certain, Minerva, that however mail delivery is determined, it is not alphabetically.”
“Then I don’t know—”
“Oh, will you please be quiet so that I can read this letter!”
It is very hot here, although the camels do not seem to mind it. With twenty-some-odd officers and over four hundred men in our regiment, making for nearly five hundred of us, it almost feels like being at school again!
How is your fine mother? And how are your sisters? On particularly hot days here, I picture you trying to herd Dora, Flora, Ivy, and Julia in from a sudden downfall with Dora always refusing to come in out of the rain so that everyone else becomes drenched as they chase her about. Odd, but the vision of other people as cool and wet has become my own personal oasis here.
Wishing this finds you well,
Kit
“He does not say much, does he?” I thrust the letter back at her. “The heat? Well, anyone with a sense of geography could have guessed at that. And he appears to have become obsessed with water. But other than that? It does not really tell us anything.”
“It tells us that he is alive,” Minerva observed stoutly. “At least each letter one of us receives does tell us that.”
. . . . .
Dear Lucy,
Let me say first: Egypt is NOT England! (And here I hear your voice in my head, “But Kit, why did you have to go all the way to Africa to learn that? I could have told you—I read about it in a book!” I will endeavor to ignore that voice, at least when it hectors and lectures me, although I do hear your voice, often; in fact, I hear it all the time. ) Back home, there were sodden months when I longed for just a peek at the sun. Well, let me tell you, I have now acquired what I wished for. Do you think I might exchange it yet again? To say that it is hot here is an understatement. And that sun? When you are out in it, there is nowhere to hide. I see now why the ancients worshipped it as a deity. That celestial orb is a relentless god, burning all who would get too close.
What is the weather like in England now? Many is the moment when I wish I had listened to you, when I wish I had gone to Oxford instead, where I might get soaked by the rain while reading Homer in the yard.
Missing your hectoring and lecturing,
Kit
. . . . .
Dear Lucy,
Imagine my surprise. I send you a heartfelt letter, and what do I get in return? A brief missive saying that if you wanted a report on the weather, I could save myself the trouble of writing because you would get that information from my letters to Minerva.
Dearest Lucy, why must you always be so … INSANE? You do not feel that I tell you enough? If more than I would ever tell anyone else, could tell anyone else, is the only thing for it, then you shall have everything.
I hate it here. Our ultimate objective, I have learned, still a long way off, is to cross the Bayuda Desert from Korti to Metemma. (Do not expect me to draw a map for you here. If you wish to know where I am talking about, you may consult your globe. ) Once there, we are to position a force close to Khartoum. Its purpose? To reinforce it while we wait for the remainder of the British army to make its way up the Nile. We have guns, we have ammunition, we have native drivers to help with the camels.
The camels!
Now here is something I suspect you do not know, despite all your opinions about camels: the camel is quite adept at desert travel, but he is no horse. Rather, he is as slow as a donkey, nor can he be mounted or dismounted from with ease. This means that once we come to the battle part of our operation, we will be forced to do so on foot. And what will we use for cover? (Oh, already I hear you laughing as I come to this part!) Since the camels are so precious to our mission—they do, after all, carry everything—we are told that we must not use them to shield ourselves from harm. Rather, they will be lashed together in the center of square formations and given cover by us! We, who will only be permitted to use saddles and boxes for cover.
The oppressive heat, the stupidly slow camels, the fear of our mission perhaps being a futile exercise in loss of home and life—some days, it is a bit much. It is a lot to hate. I think now that war is something men do, not necessarily with rhyme or reason.
And do you know what I hate most of all, Lucy? I hate being away from you. Do you know that when I kiss you, your hair smells to me like the rain? That is why I “miss water” so much, as you put it in your letter: because it reminds me of you. The heat, I find that I can live with the heat—and I will; much as I hate it here, I will stay on because I know our cause is just. At least, I do tell myself that. But I find that I cannot live without the rain, Lucy; I cannot live without you.
So do not talk to me any more of Minerva. “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba … ?” Hamlet asks. Well, what is Minerva to me? Silly Lucy. I have already told you: she is a nice girl, no more, no less. But it is you I think about out here in the desert. It is you whose face I see, whose voice I hear, whose lips I taste, whose rain-scented hair I still can smell when I close my eyes.
I know that I should not speak so to you, but being here—knowing I may never be back there—makes me bolder than I would be if you were standing right before me. Here is what I want you to know: my body thinks often of your body. Do you know what I mean?
I hope you will forgive the forwardness of my words, but I would not want to die without you knowing that I love you, with all my heart and all my mind and, yes, with my entire body. You will no doubt laugh again here. You will tell me you do not know what I am talking about or you will tell me that I do not know what I am talking about. But hopefully, when you are finished laughing, you will see the truth in what I write. What’s more, I pray you will return it.
Yours, with my camel in the desert, always yours,
Kit
. . . . .
Kit,
I cannot imagine a letter less conducive to inciting laughter. Did you purposely design it thus? You promised me laughter. Well, I did not laugh once—not once!—and now I am feeling very hard done by.
As for the rest, I know exactly what you mean. In fact, since you are so concerned about dying—which I do think you might have thought about before you left!—I will confess something too. My body has thought of your body in the way that you indicate for more than two years now.
So now I am the indelicate one, but what do I care? At least now when you are out under the stars—for I do know that that is one advantage of being where you are as opposed to being where I am, a star-crammed sky where all I have is fog and lonely Orion—you will have that picture to keep you company.
But you will not die, Kit. In an ever more confusing world where everything has gone mad on me—an aunt murdered, a father ruining himself with drink for no good reason, a mother sometimes changed beyond recognition—you are the one solid thing in that world. You are my family. So no, you will not die. I think now that I could get used to anything, so long as I never have to get used to that. And so, I simply will not allow it.
Love,
Lucy
• Thirty-two •
Kit loved me!
…I love you, with all my heart and all my mind and, yes, with my entire body …
Were any written words ever more wonderful?
But he was a world away, while I yet had to live in this world.
. . . . .
“I am worried about your father,” Mother said.
“How do you mean?”
“Surely you have marked the changes in him over the past few years.
”
Indeed, it was impossible to miss them. The eating, the drinking, the smoking—if I happened by his study, I could smell the smoke from his cigars. Even though he only engaged in this activity in his own private garden, the scent managed to snake its way into the study itself, further snaking its way out under the door and into the house proper. As for the first two items—the eating and the drinking—he had always indulged in the latter, but now overindulgence in both had resulted in a body that would not have been recognizable to those who had not seen him in two years. And the drinking, which had never appeared to affect him before, did confuse him at certain moments, even muddling his speech so that now there were times when talking to him was like talking to a watercolor painting of a person you once knew.
“Yes,” I said. “The changes started right after Aunt Helen died.”
“We all miss Helen,” she said, “but that is no reason for any of us to let ourselves go in such a grotesque fashion.” Her words were severe, only mitigated when she added, “I fear that if he does not make some changes for the better soon, he will not be long for this world.”
It seemed like a peculiar way for Mother to talk to me—she had never talked in such a way before—but then the thought occurred to me: perhaps it was because she had never viewed me as an adult before. Perhaps now she saw us as equals.
Trying to respond as an adult might respond, I impulsively covered her hand with mine.
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