‘Oh, damn it!’
She sat back on her heels, then leaned to gather them together, flicking through the folders as she did so; and to her delight almost the first thing she came across was the very thing for which she was looking – a folder containing several sketches of a radiantly pretty young woman and a small, solemn child with eyes as dark and round as pennies. She gazed at them, fascinated. For a moment the years between vanished; she could have been that child, playing by the river with Kit, watching with painful jealousy the expression on his face when he had first set eyes upon Isobel—
She tucked the sketches back in their folder and set it aside, then started to tidy the others and put them back into the trunk; as she did so, another couple slipped from the pile. She grabbed at them and, in doing so, only succeeded in scattering the contents of one of them. Tutting at herself she began to pick them up; and then, as she saw, suddenly, what she was holding, her movements stopped. She sat very still for a very long time, looking at the small drawing that she held. Then, slowly, she reached a hand for the others that lay beside her. Some were drawn in ink and some in pencil. All were on poor quality paper; some had faded badly, but others, protected by the folder, were quite clear. Some were dated; 10/1/18, 14/4/18, 10/6/18. They were all of the same person: a young woman in her twenties, a girl of mischievous vitality with black hair thick and loose about her face, her high cheekbones and light slanted eyes giving her a look of exquisite, almost fey, beauty. The artist – and it could only have been Kit – had captured her every mood. What had Michel said that afternoon on the way back from the city? The Eloise I knew as a child was full of love. Full of warmth. Full of sunshine. Full of laughter. The Eloise of yesterday.
The implications of what she had found were unequivocal. And damning. She piled the folders back into the chest, keeping back both the one that she had come to find and the one that she wished that she had not. She went downstairs by way of her bedroom, and entered the kitchen with a jacket over her arm.
‘You found them!’ Isobel took the folder and sorted through the sketches. ‘Oh, Lord – did I ever really look like that? And oh, look at you! You really did look like a little mouse! I love this one. I’m going to ask Kit to frame it for me. It would look lovely over there on the mantelpiece. Oh—’ she straightened in surprise, looking at the jacket ‘—are you going out?’
Poppy nodded. ‘It’s such a lovely evening, I thought I’d get some air before the sun goes down. I shan’t be long.’ She turned and left her sister absorbed once more in the pictures.
Kit was sitting at one of the tables in his studio, framing a watercolour. He looked up as she came in. ‘Poppy, hello. Is it dinner time already?’
She did not reply, but walked straight to the table, took something from beneath the jacket over her arm and laid it very carefully on the table before him. ‘Kit,’ she said after a moment into the shocked silence, ‘isn’t it time that you told at least someone the truth?’
Chapter Ten
‘You admit, then, that you did draw them?’
‘Yes.’
‘In 1918.’ Her words were a statement rather than a question.
‘Yes.’
Poppy, who, unable to remain still, had been prowling like a caged cat up and down the room, spun on him. ‘Kit, that was ten years ago! So why – why? – this charade of not knowing one another? Why pretend? And why did she come here in the first place? Was she looking for you? It couldn’t have been coincidence that she arrived here, in the middle of nowhere, surely?’ She spread her hands upon the table, leaning upon them, watching him. Eyes and voice were passionate. ‘Kit, what’s going on?’
Kit, still sitting at the table with the sketch in front of him, dropped his face into his hands.
Poppy stepped towards him. ‘Kit!’
He was still for a long moment, then with an abrupt movement he flung away from her to the window, stood with his back to her, shoulders hunched and hands in pockets, looking out into a spectacular sunset that lit the sky above the hills as with the fires of retribution.
Poppy waited. She saw him take his cigarettes from his pocket, heard the sharp snap of his lighter.
At last he turned. ‘All right.’ His voice was very quiet. ‘I do owe you an explanation.’
The austere line of her mouth did not soften. ‘Actually—’ her eyes were steady upon his ‘—I wouldn’t say it was to me that you owed the explanation?’ She emphasised the pronoun very slightly.
His sudden movement, the quick lift of his head, was fierce. ‘Isobel? Poppy – you haven’t shown Isobel these pictures?’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t be stupid, Kit. What on earth do you take me for? Of course I haven’t.’ She paused for a moment before adding, quite deliberately challenging, ‘Yet.’
Kit walked to a cupboard. A moment later he was back at the table with a jug and two glasses. Poppy watched, expressionless and silent, as he poured the wine, dark and glittering in the bloodied light that flooded the room. He sat down, made a small gesture with his hand. She picked up the glass he had indicated. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘won’t you sit down?’ He smiled, slightly and ruefully. ‘It’s awfully hard to talk to you while you’re towering above me like that.’
She dropped into a chair. ‘I’ve never towered above anyone in my life.’ He had turned his face a little from her. The light gilded the thick, soft hair and the long sweep of his lashes, limned the austere lines of his profile in fire.
He tilted his head back, his eyes distant, drew on his cigarette. There was a long moment of silence. ‘I was twenty years old when I first met Eloise,’ he said at last. ‘She was – is – four or five years older than I. It was the summer of 1917. In France.’ Another silence. ‘I loved her – was infatuated with her – from the very first moment I saw her. Before I had ever spoken to her. Before she had even looked at me or smiled at me. When she did, I was lost entirely. I was young, exhausted, disillusioned, afraid. She – She was a light in darkness. Beauty in the midst of almost unendurable ugliness. A shield of kindness and grace against the squalor of fear. Of death. Of cowardice.’ The word was spoken so softly that it was almost inaudible. He turned his head to look at the silent girl; smiled with wry affection. ‘Dear, practical little Poppy. I don’t suppose you believe in love at first sight, even in the most extreme of circumstances?’
‘I—’ She shrugged a little, did not continue, for a moment unable to meet his eyes.
He did not appear to notice her unwonted discomfiture, but leaned forward, took her hand in both of his, willing her to look at him. ‘Poppy, you must try to understand,’ he said, fiercely intent. ‘I don’t want you to think badly of her. Or of me. But you have to understand what it was like. The war. The sheer insanity of it; a world turned upside down. The bloody shambles of mud and death. The knowledge that nothing was safe or certain any more; that each day, each hour, each moment might be the last.’ He let go of her hand and steepled his fingers, resting his forehead on them for a moment, his eyes closed. When he spoke, his voice was bleak. ‘Unless you have seen it, you have no idea what shreds of red-hot metal can do to flesh and blood. Unless you have heard it, you cannot conceive of the sounds a man makes as the mustard gas billows over him. Unless you have lived through it, you can’t imagine what it is like to lie at night in a sodden hole not fit for a dog and hear the screams, the pleading, the agony of dying men strung upon the barbed wire of No Man’s Land like linen on some devil’s washing line—’ He lifted his head, and she almost flinched from the look on his face. ‘They turned the world into a lunatic asylum. And I? I drew it. I painted it. I pictured it for them.’
‘You were doing a job,’ said Poppy. ‘And at least you weren’t killing.’
His smile was bleaker than his voice. ‘No. There were others to do that for me. You think I didn’t know that, too?’ He picked up his glass and swallowed the wine at a draught, reached again for the jug. ‘Anyway, it’s enough to say – and I’m sure you’ll un
derstand – that under such circumstances one doesn’t always find oneself necessarily acting, or reacting, in a rational way. Emotions are heightened; there’s little or no time to think, or judge.’
She smiled a little, thoughtfully. ‘Are you sure that you can describe love as a rational emotion under any circumstances?’
His own fleeting smile acknowledged the gentle barb. He poured more wine. ‘I met Eloise in a small town on the banks of the Marne. Not that a lot of the place was still standing by the summer of ’17, but there was a small French military hospital where Eloise was nursing. She’s beautiful now; she was beautiful then – but it wasn’t simple beauty that made her what she was. Through all the horror – through all the hatred and the fear – she had somehow kept herself whole; God alone knows how. In the midst of that carnage she had not lost her love of life. Her belief in the fundamental humanity of man. In a disillusioned world she was a beacon. She brought laughter and warmth, I suppose you could call it a sense of joy, to everything she did.’ He cocked his head, watching her. ‘Hard to believe?’
Poppy sipped her wine pensively. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘Michel said much the same, if a tad less effusively, this afternoon.’
‘It’s exactly true what I said. I fell in love with her between one second and the next across a ward full of injured and dying men. There’d been an unexpected push. There was a huge influx of wounded. I’d been doing some drawings; I was co-opted to help. And – there she was.’
‘The lady with the lamp?’ Poppy suggested, a mite caustically, and then, catching his quick glance, made a small gesture of apology. ‘I’m sorry.’ Almost despite herself she found she was intrigued by this story of love and war. ‘Go on.’
Kit got up and wandered back to the window again. The light was dulling, the embers of the sunset glowing in the sky. Shadows lengthened and the air was still. In the studio it was growing perceptibly darker; the man’s slender figure stood sharply silhouetted, wreathed in smoke. For the first time and with some slight surprise Poppy realised that he still stood a little crookedly, favouring the injured leg. ‘I pursued her with the single-mindedness of a man in search of salvation. I couldn’t get her out of my mind, not for one minute, day or night. I would have done anything, gone anywhere, to be with her. Oh, I wasn’t the only one, of course. The circumstances again; I don’t think there could have been a man that passed through that hospital that wasn’t at least a little in love with her. But I was quite, quite certain that no one could love her the way I did. And I was determined to prove it to her.’
‘And – did you?’
‘At the time I think I did, yes. She laughed, and teased at first, as she did with everyone. She was friendly and she was kind. She flirted a little. But right from the start I had an advantage over the others.’
‘What was that?’
He slanted a quick, faintly amused look over his shoulder, turned for a moment away from his memories by the entirely ingenuous question. ‘My irresistible good looks?’ he suggested, ‘My sparkling personality?’
‘Don’t be silly!’ She refused to be drawn. ‘You know what I mean.’
He stubbed out his cigarette, immediately and unthinkingly produced the packet from an inner pocket and extracted another, standing and tapping it abstractedly on his thumbnail. ‘She loved me to draw her. It fascinated her that I could make her come alive on paper. I persuaded her to sit for a portrait.’
‘In the middle of a war?’
He laughed a little. ‘War, much like life, I suppose, tends to have its peaks and troughs. It isn’t one long rattle of guns and sabres, you know. Yes, I painted her portrait in the middle of a war. If one can’t occasionally do something sane in the middle of such insanity, then all reason can be lost entirely.’ He looked down at the cigarette he held as if surprised to find it in his hand. He looked around.
‘It’s here.’ Poppy picked up his lighter from the table and tossed it to him.
‘Thanks. I smoke too much.’
‘I think you probably do. So, you painted Eloise’s portrait. Then what happened?’
He lit the cigarette with unnecessary deliberation, avoiding her eyes. ‘We were young, and the times were dangerous. I was totally infatuated by her, and perhaps she was a little flattered by that. Or perhaps I’m being unfair to myself. Perhaps for her, too, it was more than simply the situation, the circumstances—’ He paused for a moment. ‘Anyway, she smuggled me into her room for the sittings.’ He stopped.
Poppy, for once, was ahead of him. ‘I see,’ she said composedly.
‘Once we had made love—’ Kit shrugged a little ‘—I was utterly obsessed. I had thought I was in love before.’ His words trailed to silence,and in the quiet a bell tolled its mellow tongue through the shadowed valley.
‘But you don’t love her now.’ There was a total certainty in Poppy’s voice.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Then why-?’
‘Poppy, please. You asked me to explain. That’s what I’m trying to do.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Later that year, in the autumn, we both managed to get leave and went to Brittany for a few days, as man and wife. We stayed in a little house on a cliff top. It was utterly idyllic. I asked her to marry me.’ There was a long moment of quiet. ‘She wouldn’t. Not then, she said. Not while the war was still on. Not while things were so uncertain. I should have guessed then, I suppose, that her feelings were not as strong as mine, but I didn’t. Perhaps I didn’t want to see it. When we got back, it was to find that I’d been recalled to England for a few weeks. They were the longest weeks of my life. I was distraught with worry for her. Then, by a stroke of luck, I managed to get myself attached to a French Observation Corps, and I went back. But this time I wasn’t alone. An old friend – a best friend since school days – came with me. He was a war correspondent, and a good one; attractive, highly intelligent and totally fearless. I think he was occasionally used by the British Intelligence people. You can probably guess his name.’
‘Peter Martin.’
‘Yes. The funny thing was, I was delighted. He was enormously good company and a very, very good friend. We’d been on assignments together before. As a matter of fact, a year or so earlier, on the Somme, he’d saved my life – or at the very least my liberty. I’d been knocked unconscious by a shell blast. He crawled through a minefield to get me, carried me back to our lines, and then behaved as if it were all a great junket, a bit of fun. I’d talked to Eloise about him many times. As you can imagine—’ for the first time there was an edge of real bitterness to his words ‘—I couldn’t wait to introduce my best friend to my best girl.’
Poppy sat in silence, watching him. After a long moment he spoke again. ‘No need to go into the gory details. I didn’t see it then but I guess what happened to me when I met Eloise happened to both of them when they met each other. I was still totally blinded by my own infatuation. I didn’t see what was going on right under my nose. Oh, I don’t blame either of them. Not any more. Eloise never did love me the way I wanted her to – perhaps even the way she wanted to. And Peter tried desperately to stay away from her, but couldn’t. Who am I to blame him for that? And, ridiculously, it was I who kept throwing them together, at first. I wanted them to like each other. I wanted them to be friends.’
‘How did you find out – what was really going on?’
His face was deep in shadow now, his quiet voice almost disembodied. ‘I found them together. In bed.’
Poppy bit her lip. ‘What did you do?’
‘I hit him. The only time I have ever hit anyone in anger. And he let me.’ He took a long, slow breath. ‘He made no attempt whatever to defend himself, he just stood there and let me. I might have killed him, I think, if Eloise hadn’t stopped me. I was so hurt, so bitter. It was like a physical pain. Worse. I remember it still.’ He came back to the table, stood looking down at the picture that still lay upon it. ‘From there on the whole thing was a nightma
re. Peter and I hadn’t finished our assignment. He moved in with Eloise and I was left alone, but we still had to work together. A few weeks later he was killed. Eloise was demented. I’ve never seen grief like it. I think she would have killed herself if it hadn’t been for the fact that she had just discovered that she was pregnant with Peter’s child. He never knew that. He died before she could tell him.’
Poppy was frowning a little. ‘But that still doesn’t explain—’
‘—why she hates me – hates me still? Why, when she saw some pictures in a Paris gallery and recognised them as mine, she tracked me down, via Florence, to here? It’s quite simple. She believes it was my fault that Peter died. I was with him, you see, when it happened. She convinced herself that I could have saved him. She thinks I deliberately left him to die.’
‘And did you?’
He took no offence at the straightforward question. ‘No. We had taken one risk too many, as we often did. The Germans broke through unexpectedly and we were trapped. There was fierce fighting around the farmhouse where we went to ground. It was chaos; most battles are. There was an abandoned truck. We waited till the fighting died down a little and made a dash for it. I made it. Peter didn’t. I tried to help him, but it was too late. It could just as easily have been me. The fortunes of war.’
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