Moonlight

by Fergus O'Connell

  Why can she not feel this way? She is the woman in the Atkinson Grimshaw painting walking down the moonlit suburban lane, alone, utterly alone. She tries to picture it now but this time she is in the picture. She sees the slick cobbles beneath her feet. Her shoes tread soundlessly on the stones. She is aware that one of her shoes is leaking so that the foot of her stocking is damp and soggy. She carries a basket on her hip. What was in the basket in the painting, Clara could never remember. She wonders whether it was intended to be a baby and that this perhaps accounted for the woman’s disorientation. Tonight Clara doesn’t want it to be a baby and so it becomes some laundry instead. She is returning it to the big house. It is how she earns her living, washing and ironing for the people in fine houses.

  She reaches the white door in the wall and turns the latch. It is open and she steps onto a flagstone path through wild, overgrown gardens that lead her to the house. She comes to the back door and, once again, finds it unlocked. Inside, the house is a maze of passageways but she seems to know her way. She is conscious that whenever she has to make a decision about which way to go, she chooses a route that takes her upwards. As though in a dream she finds herself sometimes on the servants’ stairs and sometimes on the main stairs of the house. From the outside she didn’t remember the house being so high, but her journey upwards seems interminable. Finally, she emerges through a door onto a corridor and walks to a particular bedroom. She enters and at last is able to put down her basket.

  There is a large four-poster bed in the room and to one side of that is a door that she knows leads to the bathroom. She begins to undress and throws her clothes on the carefully made-up bed. She is going to take a bath.

  Chapter 31

  Sunday 19 July 1914

  As we have seen, after receiving their assurances from Der Kaiser, the Austrian team went into serious preparation for the match in Belgrade. These preparations centred on devising that ultimatum to the Serbs, which they would be unable to accept. Working steadily, by 19 July the ultimatum is ready.

  The Austrians make ten demands on the Serbs. They are to suppress publications which incite hatred and contempt of the Austrian monarchy. They must dissolve any anti-Austrian societies. In schools, teaching anything that foments anti-Austrian feeling is to be forbidden. Any officers in the armed forces thought to be anti-Austrian are to be removed – and Austria is to be granted the right to provide the names of such officers. Serbia must also allow the Austrian government to assist in the suppression of anti-Austrian elements in Serbia. And this is just the beginning. It gets worse.

  Serbia is to begin a judicial inquiry into the assassination of 28 June and, again, elements of the Austrian government must be allowed to participate in the investigation. Serbia must arrest two named officers which, Austria has already decided, were implicated in the plot. Serbia must stop illicit arms traffic across its borders and arrest the border officials who assisted the Sarajevo assassins. (One assumes that Austria has also already decided who these people are.) Serbia is to explain why certain highly placed Serbian officials at home and abroad have expressed anti-Austrian sentiments. And finally, Serbia must notify Austria without delay that these measures have been carried out.

  As Winston Churchill will say, upon hearing the terms of the ultimatum, ‘it seemed absolutely impossible that any State in the world could accept it, or that any acceptance, however abject, would satisfy the aggressor.’

  Meanwhile, Der Kaiser’s team is considering a friendly against England. Recently the Royal Navy visited Kiel and now the Germans are thinking of sending the Third Squadron of its navy to visit a British port. The squadron will return from Norwegian waters on 8 August and the visit will be confirmed after that. There are also unconfirmed reports that Der Kaiser’s son, the Crown Prince, also known rather unkindly as ‘Little Willy,’ will visit England.

  In Germany, Jagow, the German Foreign Minister, publishes a note in the semi-official North German Gazette warning other powers ‘that the settlement of differences which may arise between Austria-Hungary and Serbia should remain localised.’ When Jagow is asked by the French Ambassador to Germany how he knows about the contents of the Austrian ultimatum, as he has revealed in the North German Gazette, he pretends to be ignorant of it.

  The British Embassy in Berlin reports, ‘We do not know the facts. The German government clearly do know. They know what the Austrian government is going to demand … and I think we may say with some assurance that they have expressed approval of those demands and promised support should dangerous complications ensure … the German government do not believe that there is any danger of war.’

  Clara has taken a long time over her imaginary bath in the Atkinson Grimshaw house. Last night she fell asleep as she began to discard her clothes on the bed. Tonight, she resumes her fantasy, beginning again out on the wide suburban lane and coming in through the gate. She fills out more details now. It is the end of summer – maybe September, Clara’s favourite month, when it is still really summer but the first sadness of autumn is starting to appear. She had been afraid that, if she returned to the fantasy too often, she would not be able to recover the original feeling it had for her. But it is as though the picture has a force that draws her in and everything feels just as good as it did the first time.

  The moon is full and so she can see that the foliage in the garden is wild as though it has passed the whole summer completely untended. Once again she enters the house via the back door and spends an age climbing up through the house. She realises now that her slow progress is about deliberately delaying her arrival at the bedroom. But she eventually gets there, opens the door and begins to undress. Even though it is September, the room is warm, as a yellow and red fire crackles in the grate. The door into the bathroom is ajar. Yellow candlelight flickers inside and there is the sound of water running and the heavy, damp thud of the bath filling. The air beyond the bathroom door is hazy with steam and smells of water.

  Clara, now naked, pads from the bedroom into the bathroom. The bathroom is warm too and has its own fire. She crosses warm wooden floorboards and deep, furry rugs. In the gauzy air of the bathroom she climbs into the bath where the almost unbearably hot water envelopes her body.

  Clara falls asleep at this point but wakes some time later. She is in bed, with Henry, wearing a nightdress but in her mind she is in the bath in the Atkinson Grimshaw house. The water has cooled and she gets out, finding a huge, hot towel close by – just like the smaller ones that she always has ready for the girls when they have baths. Clara has never seen such big towels – didn’t know that such things existed. She wraps one around herself and comes from the bathroom where she knows a man will be waiting. She wants it to be James but not just yet and so for now, it is an unknown man. Not that he is a stranger. Rather, a man that she just hasn’t put a name and a face to.

  The man kneels at her feet and parts the towel. He kisses her belly just below her navel and then starts to move his lips gradually downwards. She put her fingers in his hair and gently pushes down on the top of his head.

  Chapter 32

  Monday 20 July 1914

  The day starts badly for Raymond Poincaré, the manager of the French team, on the first day proper of his state visit to Russia. As the battleship France, steaming along at 15 knots and commanded by an admiral of the fleet, approaches the harbour at Kronstadt, it accidentally rams a Russian tug that is towing a frigate. The incident wakes Poincaré in his cabin. It is not an auspicious start.

  Things perk up, however. Around lunchtime, as the ship steams into Kronstadt, naval vessels and other craft, decorated with bunting, sail out to welcome the visitors. The imperial launch pulls alongside to transfer Poincaré to the Tsar’s yacht Alexandria. Artillery salutes rumble across the Gulf of Finland. National anthems are played.

  There is (rather startlingly high definition) British Pathé footage of the visit. It shows lots of cars and carriages, men in their best uniforms, women in white summer dresses with
big hats. There is plenty of saluting and Monsieur Poincaré raises his top hat several times. Flags wave in the summer breeze. There are Cossacks with swords and tall furry hats. The Russian Army stages a march past. The weather appears to be of that incredible, prewar, last-summer-of-innocence quality that we know (or feel we know) so well.

  Everything is neat and tidy. There is a feeling that the Russians are really trying their best. This isn’t really their thing, you feel – they’d much rather be celebrating in a different way – but they’re trying. And as for the Tsar, the Russian manager, you get the impression that he’d much rather be doing something else entirely. But still, they’re doing their best.

  With President Poincaré, you get the sense that he’d much rather be back in France – or at least back on the France. There, the food and wine would be more familiar – not to mention, better. In France he would know that his team was a real team as opposed to this one. The Russians are putting on a brave show – God love them, he knows they are and full marks to them. But really, I mean, really – if it comes to it, if it ever comes to there being a Group of Death, what will they really be capable of? Surely they will just field countless armies of untrained, badly armed and poorly led peasants; poor, luckless souls, conscripts who will be scythed down in their droves because their generals have no real idea about how to conduct a war.

  But this is not Poincaré’s problem. In fact, for him, these countless millions are a good thing because they are the keys to France’s defence. As long as the Russians threaten Germany in the east and he treats the Germans with ‘firmness’ (by which he really means intransigence) then France’s security is assured. The threat to Germany of a war on two fronts, east and west, will always be guaranteed to make the Germans see sense.

  Der Kaiser is on the yacht Hohenzollern, anchored at Balholm in Norway. Matters nautical are also on the mind of the German government. The government informs the directors of both the Norddeutscher Lloyd and the Hamburg America Line shipping companies that Austria will soon present an ultimatum that may cause a general European war, and that they should start withdrawing their ships from foreign waters back to Germany at once. That same day, the German Navy is ordered to start concentrating the High Seas Fleet. On the Vienna, Berlin and Paris stock exchanges, there is a continual demand for gold bars. In the end, so that all of this activity can take place and complete, another four days are allowed before the ultimatum is delivered.

  Because of the Austrian delay in writing the ultimatum, the element of surprise that Germany had counted upon in the war against Serbia is lost. Instead, the strategy of ‘localisation’ is adopted. This means that when the Austro-Serbian war begins, Germany will pressure other powers not to become involved. The postman usually delivers the post before Henry goes to work and so it is this morning. During term time, when they hear the postman at the letterbox, one of the girls will ask Henry if they can go and retrieve the mail. He allocates the job evenly from one to the other, sometimes – if he is in a good mood – making a bit of a show out of it, pretending to try to remember who did it last time. If he’s in an especially good mood, he can keep this going for all of breakfast time and work the girls up into a frenzy of excitement and anticipation and false starts. ‘Let me think now,’ he’ll say. Or, ‘I’m sure it was Ursula who did it yesterday,’ knowing full well that it wasn’t. Or, ‘You’ll have to be very, very quiet while I try to remember,’ until the girls, unable to contain themselves any longer, will be squealing with delight. It can be quite a performance and Clara is always glad to see everybody so happy.

  This morning, though, it being the school holidays, the girls are still in bed and fast asleep. Clara hears the letters being pushed through the letterbox and she gets up from the table to go and fetch them. Usually they are all for Henry. On those odd occasions when there is one for her, he will always ask her whom it’s from. If she can’t tell from the writing on the envelope, he’ll get her to open it and tell him. It is something that really annoys Clara so that this morning, when she finds that there is a letter addressed to her in a hand she doesn’t recognise, she is intrigued. While still out in the hall, she slips the letter into the pocket of her apron. She will read it after Henry has gone to work.

  Once that happens she pours some fresh tea and takes the letter out of her pocket. It occurs to her for a moment that it might be from James – how exciting that would be, but she remembers that she has never given him her address. He could find it out, she supposes, working where he works and knowing who he knows. Whoever it’s from, the confident handwriting in dark blue ink is unfamiliar her. It is a woman’s hand, Clara thinks. She slits the envelope open with her breakfast knife. The single page of ordinary writing paper is folded in two. She opens it and reads.

  Her first reaction is that she must have opened someone else’s letter by mistake – that it has been wrongly delivered to her. She checks the envelope again but there is no mistake. It is her name and address with the word ‘Personal’ written on it. So she reads the letter again. It is only two sentences.

  ‘Dear Mrs Kenton, This is to let you know that your husband is carrying on an affair with another woman. I thought you should know.’

  It’s signed, ‘A well-wisher.’

  Clara puts the letter down on the oilcloth of the kitchen table. Then she pushes it right across the table as though to distance herself from its message. She stands up, goes to the window and looks out into the back garden. She finds that she is hugging herself. She feels as though some kind of monster has invaded the room. By looking out into the normality of the garden, she hopes that somehow it will go away. She doesn’t know how long she stands like this, looking but not seeing. However, when she turns, the letter is still there on the table.

  She picks it up again and reads it, just in case she had somehow mistaken its meaning. When it’s clear that she hasn’t, she throws it back down.

  It is what she has feared all along. The thing she has wondered about, spent all those nights worrying about, has at last happened. Her normal, humdrum life is over. She has entered a new and strange and terrible world.

  She sits back down in her chair and phrases begin to form in her mind. The things she is going to say to Henry when he comes home. But her mind quickly jumps from this to the fact that while he has been having sex with her, he has also been doing it with somebody else. She thinks of his cock inside that other woman, whoever she is, and then coming home and putting it into her.

  Then she starts to wonder who this woman is. What does she look like? What do she and Henry talk about when they’re not in bed fucking? What does she have that Clara doesn’t have? Clara is angry. She has always been a good wife. She has given him sex whenever he wanted it, borne him two beautiful children, fed him well – his stomach is a testament to that. She has kept a neat home and put up with all his moods and foibles. She has been careful with the housekeeping money, rarely spending anything on herself. Is this the thanks she gets?

  By now, Clara is crying. Tears are streaming down her face and she can hardly see, her eyes are so wet. She gets up from the chair and takes a couple of steps but finds that she is unable to stand. She crumples onto the linoleum floor, her skirt pooling around her. She buries her face in her hands and begins to keen. What has she done to deserve this? Why has her life ended up in such a shambles? All she wanted was to meet a man who would love her – love her, as she loves – with everything, body and soul, heart and mind. Was this too much to ask?

  Clara has no idea how much time goes by, but eventually her keening stops though she continues to cry. She wonders where tears come from. Is there a limitless supply? Can the body eventually run out of tears? And if it did, would that mean that all the water was gone from your body? And would that mean you would be dead? Maybe she will just cry herself to death.

  She needs to get some air. With the help of a chair she pulls herself to her feet and goes out into the garden. She leans against her father’s tree and stretches
her arms around it as though she would embrace it. She presses the skin of her cheek into the hard crust of the trunk until it hurts. What is she to do? Oh God, what is she to do?

  Then it occurs to her that the letter is false. It is somebody just trying to hurt her. But who? She knows so few people. And she can’t imagine why anybody would want to hurt her. To the best of her knowledge, she has never done anything to anybody that would make them feel like that towards her. She doesn’t think she has any enemies.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy. Where are you?’

  Clara hears the voice as though from a long way off. It sounds like the voice of a child lost in a forest, in those fairy stories she used to read when she was young. She pulls away from the tree and turns round, hastily dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. Ursula is standing in the frame of the back door. Clara knows she must look a sight.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’

  ‘Oh nothing, darling,’ Clara manages to say airily. ‘I was just chopping onions.’

  ‘Oh, there’s Mrs Parsons,’ says Ursula and disappears back through the kitchen.

  Clara had forgotten about Mrs Parsons and, oh Jesus, the letter is still on the table. Clara hurries into the kitchen and retrieves it, stuffing it into her apron pocket. She needs to go to the bathroom and compose herself. She hurries through the hall, brushing past Mrs Parsons who is coming through to the kitchen.

  ‘Alright, Mrs Kenton?’ It is what Mrs Parsons always says but this morning Clara notices a tiny note of alarm in the housekeeper’s voice.