‘There are buns,’ she said, pointing to the canteen for soldiers along the platform. Her head filled with memories of Thuringa, of rides under the trees. A world before bandages. ‘Or we could find lunch somewhere. Where are you staying?’
‘The parents of a chap I trained with are putting me up. Out Hampstead way. I say, would Lady Alison mind frightfully if he came to dinner too? He’s a good egg, I promise you.’
Hampstead. Not a good address, Sophie thought automatically, while saying, ‘Of course.’
‘Do you know somewhere we could lunch? Sophie, it’s good to see you.’
‘And you.’ She meant it.
‘You look … different. Beautiful.’
‘I’m still the same.’ She led the way automatically to the taxi rank; thought, equally automatically, that if James or poor Philip or Dolphie were there she would be following instead.
It was an old-fashioned restaurant: booths instead of tables, plush red bench seats. James had taken Alison and her there, a world ago. She hoped James wouldn’t enter and find her here lunching with another man, even innocently. He was probably far too busy for restaurant lunches, in any case.
They sat opposite each other, studying the menu. I need to speak, she thought. They both knew there were rocks to clamber over before they could talk normally.
She took a breath. ‘Malcolm, I’m sorry. I know what you must think of me.’
‘I thought you had found another chap,’ he said with honesty. He gestured to her left hand. ‘But you’re not engaged.’
‘I was too young, that’s all — just as I told you.’
Malcolm looked up at the waiter. ‘Clear soup and lamb chops, I think.’ The man had moved off before Sophie realised Malcolm had ordered for them both.
‘Funny to be here unchaperoned,’ she said lightly. ‘It would have been unthinkable a year ago.’
‘Yes.’ He grinned. ‘And in a few days I’ll be taking pot shots at the Hun.’
She was about to say he didn’t have to pretend at heroics, not with her. And then she saw his excitement was real. Perhaps he would be a hero, accepting the front lines as calmly as he might a broken arm after a game of football. Or perhaps, in weeks, this young man would be gone — irrevocably changed, if still alive.
‘I was afraid it would be all over before I got through training.’
He knew less than she did. Saw it still through a thrill of excitement, was aware of only what the papers published.
I know the Kaiser’s cousin, she thought. I’ve met the men who make decisions. I’ve helped nurse those who carried them out.
Before Miss Lily, even before Sergeant Brandon, she might have dismissed him as an ignorant colonial, a boy who still believed that heroics were enough to win a war. Now she smiled at the waiter who placed the soup in front of her, then smiled at Malcolm too. ‘We’ll have to make the most of twenty-four hours.’
The pre-dinner sherry was awkward: four strangers worlds apart. Malcolm and his friend Bunty Armitage admired Philip’s French Impressionist paintings with some reserve. Sophie could see they really considered even the graceful Monet mere daubs of paint. They spoke of their just-completed basic training with the army as a lark, learning to make out the shapes of men in sand hills in the dark, as though war came with toast and honey and perhaps charades afterwards.
The dinner gong was a relief. Lieutenant Armitage took Alison in to dinner; Sophie placed her hand on Malcolm’s arm.
Ffoulkes served; he wouldn’t demean the house by letting a maid do so. Soup first: a mutton broth. The silence was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Sophie hunted for conversation. ‘At least we’re not talking about kangaroos.’
Malcolm grinned in relief. ‘Have you been asked about kangaroos too?’
‘Endlessly. I even told the truth about them at first, but then it got too much. I told one man I had a pet kangaroo in Sydney.’
‘You mean you don’t?’ asked Lieutenant Armitage too innocently. ‘Malcolm, you rotter, you told me you had one too.’
‘That was a pet emu. Well, a pair of emus. They pull our carriage when the horses need a break.’
‘You have never mentioned emus.’
‘It’s true, isn’t it, Sophie?’
‘Of course. Kangaroos have more endurance than emus, but they’re far too jerky to pull a carriage.’
Alison laughed. It was so good to hear her laugh. ‘Sophie, behave yourself.’
Sophie smiled at her, then at the men. This has to be a good night, she thought. It may be the last good night they have. A night of laughter for Mouse too. She leaned across the table to Alison. ‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘If you give me away about kangaroos, I’ll tell them about your giraffe.’
Lieutenant Armitage grinned. He had a scatter of pimples on his chin. ‘What giraffe?’
‘Alison had a pet giraffe when she was small. Well, no one could see him, but he was there.’
‘Of course he was there. His name was Wuffles,’ said Alison with dignity. ‘And he was pink.’
‘A pink giraffe?’
‘He was my giraffe, so he was pink.’ This was a different Alison, a relaxed and happy hostess, despite her uncomfortable bulk. Miss Lily might have given her the skills to charm these young men, but her marriage had given her the confidence to use them.
‘Quite right, Lady Alison. It’s far better to have a pink giraffe than kangaroos.’
Ffoulkes removed the soup.
‘What did you do before the war, Lieutenant Armitage?’ asked Alison, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. Sophie mentally prepared a tactful way to remove a woman in labour from a dinner party.
‘I was at Oxford, studying chemistry.’
‘One doesn’t study chemistry,’ said Malcolm. ‘You simply do it and it smells. Or blows up in your face.’
‘I say, old chap, that’s a bit rich. Sheep smell too, you know.’
‘But they smell of sheep,’ said Sophie. ‘Now, kangaroos smell of roses. Except in spring, of course.’
Turbot was served next, and they were still laughing, at ease with each other now; venison from Wooten — last night’s leftovers heated up; she noticed that Alison was given a single thin slice, and herself too, while the men had larger portions. Alison’s instructions, she was sure. This was followed by a potted shrimp savoury — probably pre-war — and an apple meringue, the fruit and eggs sent down with them from Wooten.
She and Alison withdrew to the drawing room. She doubted the men would be long over their port.
Alison settled herself awkwardly on the sofa — grey silk, like Miss Lily’s. Where is Miss Lily? thought Sophie. There had been no more letters, from her or the earl, though Sophie had written to them both.
‘So that’s your Malcolm. I like him.’
‘I like him too. But not enough.’
‘He’s very young.’
‘Older than me.’
‘You know exactly what I mean.’
‘Yes. I do. He won’t be young when he gets back, though.’
Alison watched her. ‘Were you hoping Mr Lorrimer would propose?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sophie slowly. ‘I don’t think this is a time for marriage.’
Alison nodded. ‘Not to acquire a young wife who’s never managed a household before, especially not for a man in his position.’
‘You make me sound like a dog he doesn’t have time to train. A fox terrier, perhaps. But I don’t want to leave Wooten just now anyway.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Alison simply. ‘I don’t think we could do without you.’
‘You’d manage.’
‘Oh, yes, we’d manage. But you do more than manage. Grandmama heard from the lieutenant colonel that he’s recommended your system of sorting the wounded into categories for use at other army hospitals.’
‘Really?’ She felt absurdly pleased.
Male voices sounded in the hall. Alison added fresh hot water to the teapot.
Sophie saw them to the d
oor, Ffoulkes tactfully absent, Lieutenant Armitage even more tactfully just popping outside ‘to check the cab, old thing’.
‘May I kiss you?’
The kiss was gentle. Then he kissed her harder, and that was different too. It tasted of desperation, neither sex nor love. She wondered what she should have felt, suspected that whatever it was, he had failed to find it too, wondered also if she should have felt she was betraying James. But then James had neither kissed her nor proposed. And at least Malcolm had given her a kiss goodbye. He stood back. ‘I’d better go.’
‘We’ll come to the station to see you off.’ Suddenly she realised that they would be leaving the next morning. But before she could speak, he shook his head.
‘It’s too early. No, truly, I’d rather say goodbye here than with a hundred chaps watching.’ He grinned at her suddenly. ‘Don’t look like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like I’m a poor doomed soldier off to unknown horrors.’
She made herself smile. ‘I’m sorry. Too much nursing.’
‘Nursing?’
She’d never told him, she realised. Had laughed about giraffes, but not told him anything of real importance about her life over the past nine months. ‘The Abbey has been turned into a hospital. I’m not really a nurse, though I’m doing my first-aid exams. We just help where we can.’
‘Sophie, I had no idea. I thought you were,’ he shook his head, ‘partying. Having dinners with the gentry.’
She laughed, determined to lift the cloud. ‘I am having dinners with the gentry. It’s just that those dinners are usually vegetable soup and Irish stew. Or bread and cheese if we’re too tired to eat a proper meal.’
‘Can we meet again? On my next leave?’
‘Of course.’
‘There’s no of course about it. Do you realise we don’t know each other? I don’t think we ever did. I’d like to get to know you now. Like to know I’ve a friend from home in England.’
He kissed her cheek, a gentle kiss. ‘I’m not going to die over there, Sophie. I’m not even going to be one of your wounded. They breed us tough at Warildra.’
She believed him.
Even Windsor looked different as Sophie helped Alison off the train, the Guards’ band playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘God Save the King’ as a trainload of cheering soldiers left for the front. They looked so young, so much younger than the patients at the Abbey.
The trees were leafless, the lower Home Park and Eton’s playing fields beyond were a grey mirror of floodwater, as though it couldn’t be bothered flowing down to the river.
The castle was even colder than in summer, with white-faced women in heavy mourning imploding along the corridors: Guards’ wives — now widows — lodged at Windsor and on its outskirts. The Guards had been hit hard. So many widows in so short a time.
Alison and Sophie stayed in adjoining rooms in Henry VIII’s tower. Queen Mary’s physician gave Alison a fresh examination — presumably on Her Majesty’s orders — and then they dined with the royal family and their guests. The old rule about not publicly receiving anyone in trade had gone with the outbreak of war. Even actresses could be admitted now.
The food was simple: like the War Secretary, Lord Kitchener, the King had forbidden the household alcohol, hoping to set an abstemious example to the factory workers. They ate mulligatawny soup, followed by turbot and vegetable cutlets with green peas.
‘The chef threatened to resign,’ said Queen Mary as a footman in white wig and brocade — which seemed still unwashed since their last visit — served cold custard in little cups, and rice pudding. ‘He says there is no call for his art now.’
Admiral Campbell looked up from his rice pudding. ‘Then let him. He can cook for the men in the trenches.’
Queen Mary smiled, but didn’t answer. She had shadows under her eyes, and her skin looked like tracing paper. She had spent the morning at one munitions factory, the afternoon at another, giving small speeches of encouragement, then had visited the local hospital.
After dinner the women knitted. Her Majesty knitted perfectly, Sophie noted, as she tried to hide the holes in the soldier’s belly band she was working on — she had given up any attempt at socks. She felt a moment’s incredulity that Sophie Higgs was sitting with the Queen, knitting, while the King and his advisors discussed affairs of state only a corridor away.
Such a womanly occupation, knitting. And such a treat to have a whole evening of doing it, of being attended, not attending.
Chapter 46
Every spy is a patriot — to the other side. Every patriot is an enemy to those who prefer peace.
Miss Lily, 1915
MAY 1915
Alison did not go into labour from the rigour of the journey, as Sophie had feared. She was still determined to have her baby born at Wooten, as her father and ancestors had been.
Now, back at work, it seemed that new days were no longer being created, just part of already lived days patched up and returned to them. Routine had become drudgery. Wooten ran as though it had always been a convalescent hospital. Each day differed only in its petty crises and its tragedies: men crippled, blinded, or muttering in madness and kept isolated till they had healed enough to be moved to an asylum. Graves stretched across part of the church’s hay paddock.
Newspapers arrived but were rarely read, except the casualty lists, which all obsessively checked for names they knew.
Malcolm’s friend Lieutenant Armitage had been wounded after only two days’ active service, and sent to Cambridge again, still in uniform, missing half a finger but already working in research. Sophie had no idea what one researched in wartime, but at least he was safe. Lord Buckmaster was mapmaking, of all things. Safe. The Duke of Wooten was now in Mesopotamia. Safe when last heard of. The Earl of Shillings, promoted to a colonel, was not yet on the casualty lists as wounded, dead, a prisoner or missing. Malcolm had been mentioned in dispatches for gallantry in the same skirmish that had wounded his friend. Safe when last heard of too.
The Wooten postboy, Ernest: dead. The butcher’s son, Eric: dead. The Honourable David Threasington-Blythe: dead. Eight sons from the Wooten estate, two of whom were husbands and fathers: dead. Another legless; yet another with a head wound, unmoving, unseeing, back in his small room under the cottage eaves. So many of the young men Sophie had danced with: dead, missing, wounded. Time consumed lives in greedy gulps, turning what should have been lifetimes into hours or days.
And yet time passed. The war had become bogged down in mud. France, at last, was no longer being nibbled into by the German armies. Both sides had dug a continuous line of trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland. Small parties made brief sorties to capture a few yards of hill or opposite trench, but even more time was spent playing cards in sodden dugouts, or football around the tangles of barbed wire.
All ships in English waters, neutral or not, were targeted by German guns and submarines now. Germany intended to starve Britain if it couldn’t conquer it. The price of bread soared, but Mr Slithersole still came through for Wooten. Sophie saw each bowl of corned-beef stew with pride.
Women worked in fields that had known only men before — hoeing, mattocking, digging drainage channels. Women drove the farm carts. Women volunteers drove other carts carrying the wounded or the convalescent to the hospitals or rest homes that were mostly private homes, requisitioned by the military or offered, but still run partly or even mostly by volunteers. Where had this vast array of skills come from, these women so suddenly knowing and capable? No one, thought Sophie, had time or energy to enquire.
No changing for dinner these days, but one did, at least, change one’s apron and remove one’s veil. Alison, once again quiet as the mouse for which she had been nicknamed, growing even larger, refused to rest in the afternoons, even for her coming baby’s sake.
‘It’s all I can do to repay Philip,’ she said, when Sophie once more urged her to lie down. ‘I … I miss being hugged, Sophie. Philip hugged
me every morning at breakfast. It’s funny, but that’s what I miss most.’
‘You are very huggable, dear Mouse,’ said Sophie, suiting the action to the words. ‘By me. By your grandmother. I’ll hug you every day from now on. I promise.’
‘Grandmama doesn’t believe in hugs, I think. But soon I’ll have my baby. They are so huggable, aren’t they?’ She looked at her belly. ‘Soon,’ she said. ‘Soon.’
More days. The baby did not come. More vanloads of men did. Mr Slithersole’s corned-beef truck was outfitted with rows of sliding stretchers now, so it could carry thirty men, as long as they could bear another layer just above them for the ten minutes it took to drive from the railway to the Abbey. Life went on, and so did pain and death.
Sophie had just finished the new staff rosters — they still tried to give each servant a half-day off a week, and time for church every third Sunday — when Alison found her in the corridor.
‘Sophie? My waters broke.’ Alison smiled faintly, seemingly matter-of-fact. ‘Thank goodness for petticoats. I don’t think the men noticed.’
Sophie hid her relief. Alison was more than a week overdue, the duchess about to wire a physician to come from London. ‘I’ll take you up to your room and get the doctor.’
‘I don’t want a man now. Sister Martens has delivered hundreds of babies.’
Sophie silently thanked Mr Slithersole for finding them nurses from a maternity hospital.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ said Alison. ‘It will be fine.’
Thirty-six hours later Alison was screaming. Labour had been slow, stopping and starting till the last six hours of constant pain. The dowager duchess sat beside her, alternatively knitting and holding Alison’s hands while she strained and pushed.
Sister Martens checked under the sheet again. ‘I’m going to fetch the doctor,’ she said quietly.
‘But Alison didn’t want —’ began Sophie.
‘The baby needs forceps if we’re going to get it out,’ said Sister Martens, more bluntly than she’d ever have spoken in the days of the maternity clinic. ‘I don’t have any.’
Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies Page 34