by Ella Carey
Ascombe, the home of Freya and her new husband, Henry, was a three-mile bike ride away. As Emma weaved along the narrow country roads, the discomfort that played around her insides billowed into something that seemed impossible, unthinkable. All the while, she asked why, when she believed that rationalism was the only way to deal with this life, was she left at the mercy of her own uncontrollable feelings for Patrick? How was she supposed to reconcile that with her theories?
Freya maintained that why was a useless question to ask. And yet it was the question that Ambrose, Oscar, and Lawrence seemed to debate in endless circles, looking for answers. But were there answers? What was the reason for the ghastliness of the war? There could be no reason for the fear and dread that every parent faced each day, only to be pathetically grateful if their sons had been spared from death’s merciless scythe while others were being cropped like wheat by some force none of them could control.
Why seemed the most futile question in the end. Emma guessed that the only answer came back to G. E. Moore—a firm belief in friendship, no matter what, and the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure. But she was doing that, and still, she had her moments.
Her circle of friends had all sworn to atheism before the war. And yet, where did her love for Patrick come from? Because at times, she swore in turn that it almost felt divine. The love, acceptance, and kindness she felt for him were far beyond anything she understood or could control. How did rationality, which she believed in, explain feelings of unconditional love for another person whom she was not supposed to love? Perhaps it was just a loophole of her imagination, something that was forbidden, which she should ignore because it was well out of the bounds of what society wanted her to do.
She dropped her bike out front of Freya’s house. The first thing her eyes landed on was her sister, sitting and writing, framed in one of the French doors of the tall house. Freya said she felt complete here, able to curl up with a book or write after long walks in the countryside. The woods around the house were silent, still fresh and dewy in the morning and yet starting to thaw out as the increasing sunshine spread yellow light down from the clear blue sky.
But Emma frowned as she made her way to Freya’s study. Here was the difference: Freya’s husband adored her, and he was available fully to her. It was as simple as that. Their lives were hardly conventional—Freya was not going to have children, and she was determined to build a career as an independent writer of both critical essays and novels.
While, like Emma, Freya was largely formally uneducated in comparison with the men who surrounded her, she could well hold her own with her acerbic wit. She was experimenting with her individual, striking form of modernism, writing books that were rollouts of the subconscious, random scatterings of the thoughts that run through our heads every day, while managing to convey character and some sense of narrative at the same time. Her work was thrilling and bold. Freya was the person Emma needed to be with right now.
Emma stopped, one hand poised on Freya’s French door. The panic she felt had started in what was going to be her bedroom, which she would never share with Patrick because Patrick was not coming alone to Summerfield. Rupert, his latest lover, a man to whom he seemed closer than any of his former male friends, was going to be at Summerfield too. She’d saved Patrick from condemnation, but unwittingly, she’d collected his new lover. Where on this earth did that leave her?
Freya appeared at the door, her gaze running down Emma’s figure. Emma knew she must look a wreck. She felt ashen. There was no doubt she would look ashen too. She raked a hand through her hair.
“Em?” The sun shone incandescent on Freya’s face, which with its large brown eyes and rosebud mouth was not quite a mirror image of Emma’s face. Freya’s gaze was rich with questions, while knowing all at once.
“Oh, dear God, come in,” Freya said, opening the door wide, stepping aside for Emma to enter her sanctuary of a space out here.
Emma marched toward the mantelpiece, glaring at the elegant modern clock that Henry had bought for Freya so that she didn’t entirely forget the time while she wrote. Emma leaned heavily on the mantel, resting her head in the crook of her arms. Her breathing was labored. Sudden, unexpected physical pain seared through her chest.
Having closer proximity to Patrick had seemed like a heaven of an idea in so many ways, but was she really going to cope with him sharing his bedroom with Rupert, right across the hallway from her own room, every night?
She did not look at Freya, instead focusing on the dew on the lawn. It was even colder here at Ascombe than it was at Summerfield, buried as it was in the middle of the woods. Ghosts were supposed to haunt the house, but Freya loved that about the old place.
“I am beginning to wonder where, in the middle of all this, my interests lie, Freya,” Emma blurted out. “What is there of me? For me?”
Freya angled over her desk, placing her fountain pen back in the inkwell. She drew her arms around herself. “It will either resolve itself or it won’t.”
But Emma was in no mood for her sister’s wit. It was not practicality that she needed—it was rare for her to feel this way, but she just needed someone to listen and understand.
“What if he leaves me completely for Rupert?” Emma knew she was panicking. Her thoughts, like those of Freya’s characters in her books, were tumbling unconscious out of control in one direction. The wrong direction? She was only terrified that she was right.
Freya reached out and took both Emma’s hands in her own. Freya’s touch was cool and firm. For once, Emma’s sister looked decisive, in control when Emma needed her to be just that. Thank goodness Freya was not in the grip of one of her own bad turns such as had come over her in the years after their father’s death. While Emma knew she had to be the strong one, the older sister who looked after her fragile younger sibling, she thanked goodness for the times when Freya, in turn, did exactly that for her.
“Emma,” she said, “you are giving Patrick the home he never had growing up while his parents remained in India, the home and stability that he never will have with these serial relationships he has with other men. You are the one constant in his life. I have no doubt of his feelings for you. No doubt, Em, at all.”
Emma fell into Freya’s shoulder, letting her sister stroke her hair.
“In a time of war, he wants to be with you, Em. He wants you close. You have to focus on the fact that he’s wanted that since he met you.”
The first weeks at Summerfield were relentless and cold and tough. While Emma fought with her own guilt about being away from the potboiling reminders of war back in London, there were still harsh intrusions from the deadly conflict in France even here in Sussex. The sounds of gunfire ricocheted across the channel as Emma worked in the garden, audible even with the South Downs as protection.
Even if she avoided newspapers, unable to tolerate the graphic horrors outlining the marauding and killing of adolescent boys and young men that flooded the streets of London, it was impossible not to be swept up when awful news came through of friends’ deaths in the Somme. At times she would look at Calum playing in the walled garden under the watchful eye of his nanny or she would play games with him and look at her sensitive, growing boy with his delightful inquiring mind and have no idea how parents with sons at the front lines coped, knowing that they might get a dreadful telegram at any moment.
When Ambrose arrived, as he did most weekends, overstimulated and yet exhausted from his work with the war treasury, his eyes were like two tiny bright dots in his pale, sun-deprived face. He’d bring tragic stories of more men they knew or sons of friends, lost at sea or maimed or falling from the sky. Boys whom they’d entertained in Bloomsbury, part of their wider social group. Boys who would never again live as Emma did freely here at Summerfield.
Her melancholy spread, worsening as the weeks went on. Sadness flowered inside her for the ongoing war, but still, she could not face having anything to do with the ghastly conflict, even though women were working a
s nurses and in administrative jobs in London.
Patrick and the tall, fair-haired, muscular Rupert, the younger son of an aristocrat whom Patrick had met through Ambrose, buried themselves in labor, pushing their bodies to the breaking point out in the hard, unforgiving soil, delivering spring lambs at all hours of the night, harvesting wheat, tilling the land as so many generations had done before them in an effort to keep the home fires safe. Patrick knew his contribution did not hold a slim candle to the risks other men took and the sacrifices other families made, but the idea of bloodshed and hurting another human still sickened him to the core.
In the cold, dark evenings, he would fuel his innate need to draw by working on more detailed sketches of Emma for his portrait. Too tired to begin work on the final canvas, he contented himself with filling his little sketchbooks with images of her—hands, feet, capturing the myriad of expressions that passed across her face, the way she crossed her legs, tilted her head, smiled . . . This became the most intimate and special memory for her of those war years, because when he was sketching her, Emma felt the connection that existed between them run through her like wildfire. It didn’t matter that Rupert was there. Somehow, when Patrick drew her so intimately, when he was focused on her, it was as if no one else was in the room. Night after night, as if he were both sated and exhausted, he would go to bed early, leaving the younger Rupert and Emma sitting up alone.
In the depths of the freezing winter, she and Rupert sat night after night in the small sitting room. Emma couldn’t help but notice how his blue eyes were splashed with telltale red train tracks due to lack of proper sleep, and his blond hair was tousled and growing longer each week. He rested his head in his hands and remained quiet.
Snow lay about outside the window, a thin, cold layer of white, freezing underfoot and wet enough to soak the wood they needed to burn for warmth in the house. Emma knew that the only way to survive Patrick’s infatuation with Rupert was for her to become intimate friends with him. She’d made every effort to do so, because she knew if she kept Rupert near to her, Patrick would also be close. She was a little unsure of him, though, and of the veracity of his love for Patrick. Rupert had enjoyed several affairs with women back in London, and she worried that Patrick was more in love with the handsome, younger blond man than Rupert was with Patrick.
She turned to the weak flame that tried and failed to crackle in the fireplace. They’d placed the only cuts of wood that had any potential to light up properly in Calum’s room.
“There is one way we could warm ourselves.” Rupert’s voice cut into the candlelit room. He moved closer to her. The scent of strong woodsmoke mingled with the sweaty smell of Rupert’s hard-worked body.
Instinctively, Emma moved away from him on the pale sofa. She’d made a new cover for it, printing woodblocks on cheap calico that she’d brought from London.
He went on, his voice low and silklike. “It would be impossible to imagine that tension could not exist between you and me given we are closeted here for the duration of the war, both loving Patrick as we do. Surely, Em, were we to sleep together, it would break any difficulties between us. I’ve been wanting to say this for weeks. Please, give me a chance, Em.”
Rupert was too close.
“Rupert, that would be impossible. We could never hide it from Patrick. And it would upset him so.”
Rupert’s usually pale cheeks were flecked with bright red, and his nose was swollen from the cold.
Emma tucked her hands into the sleeves of her cardigan. “Come on, Rupe, you know that won’t work.”
He traced his fingers along the patterns in the sofa. “You, me, Patrick. Patrick and I lovers, you in the middle between us. I know how you feel about Patrick. But you know that I love women too. It would make sense, you and I. Why not?”
Emma stood up. She made her way through the relentless biting air toward the scant sliver of warmth that resonated from the fireplace.
“Don’t tell Patrick about this conversation, for heaven’s sake,” she said, her words seeming to cut in the freezing air. She pressed her fingers into the white-painted mantelpiece until they left a wet impression on the cold wood.
“I’ve been seeing a woman up in London—” he began.
She whipped around. “Patrick is in love with you. He adores you, Rupe.” She ground the words out. She would not see Patrick hurt. She would not.
“He’s in love with you.” Rupert’s words swirled in the room.
Emma lifted her eyes up to the ceiling. She’d painted that too. Would she spend her entire life trying to make something out of nothing? She lifted her hand to cover her eyes.
“Well, that’s your subjective viewpoint,” she said, gathering herself with all the strength she could find. “And one I do not entirely agree with. Love chooses us, just as birth chooses us, just as death chooses us. These things are entirely random. The more I think about it—and perhaps my thoughts are intensified because of this stupid, infantile war—the more I realize how random everything is in this world. I just cannot see any meaning in it. Me, Patrick, you.” She softened her voice. “I know that three of us here is not ideal, Rupe. But he’s not in any way in love with me. He loves me, yes, but there’s a difference in the way he loves me and the manner in which he loves you. And I am also very fond of you. Please, don’t let’s complicate things any further. I am unable to sleep with anyone without an emotional connection to them.”
“Oh, why are you so damned good?” He was up and standing next to her before she could take a step away. “Why do you lock yourself up with all these theories rather than allowing yourself to be with someone who can love you like I can? You don’t live, Em. Can’t you see that other men desire you?” He reached out and stroked her icy cheek.
Emma jolted. Her cheek was cold, that was true, but she had not realized how cold until he stroked it with his freezing finger. “Rupert.” Her voice was dangerous and low. “I will not have Patrick hurt. You misinterpret my friendship and exploit it.”
He remained close to her. “You are a sexual woman. More so than many women I know.” He growled the words. “What is wrong with men who are not homosexual? You surround yourself with them. You stick, hopelessly, to being in love with Patrick. Why?”
“You are being irrational. You just told me that Patrick loves me. And as for the way I choose to live—is there something wrong with a woman wanting to live life on her own terms? I acknowledge that love is beyond our control, that so much in this world is random, but I insist on the dignity of being able to run the aspects of my own life that I can run myself. And that includes saying no to love affairs that will ultimately go nowhere.”
“I don’t want in any way to change what you have, Em.”
“That may be the case. But you want both Patrick and me, and we both know who would be devastated!” The air from her nostrils was thick with frost. “Please, don’t raise this again.”
But he was behind her. “Nothing is going to stop my wanting you, Emma. You need someone who can love you properly. He can’t. I can.”
Emma closed her eyes. “All I can repeat to you is that I want you to never, ever raise this again,” she said. Her teeth were gritted now.
He reached out and ran his hand around her waist.
“No!”
“It would make things so much simpler between us. You need satisfying.” His voice was silken now.
“Rupert. Stop.” She pulled away from him and rested her hand on the biting-cold, round brass handle of the door. “I want us to be friends. You must never speak of this again.”
“You deserve to be properly loved.”
Emma closed her eyes. “I cannot in any way hurt Patrick, and I will never do so.”
“And yet you let him hurt you,” he said.
“You are being ridiculous.” She let out a short laugh.
“He holds you on an elastic band, reeling you in when you appear to have any doubts. But you can’t see it. You continue blindly, like a lit
tle mole in a dark tunnel. Em—”
“That is not the truth. Stop it.” Emma’s voice seared into the candlelit room. She faced him, her body freezing, almost rigid with cold. “I am going to bed.”
“Take me with you.” He slumped down on the sofa, throwing his face into his hands.
Silently, Emma picked up a candle and walked out of the room. But once she was at the top of the staircase, she stopped. Rupert had turned on the radio downstairs. Emma looked at Patrick’s closed bedroom door, stood there a moment, only to move back to her own single bedroom, where she hovered briefly, her hand on the door handle, before letting herself in and locking the door.
Emma threw herself into a frenzy of gardening throughout the spring, exhausting herself as if mirroring Patrick’s and Rupert’s constant physical hardship. She taught Calum to read, to draw, shared with him the beauty of nature that was resplendent at Summerfield, allowed him to run wild and free as much as she could, showered him with love. During the hours when she had any time on her hands, she decorated the walls in every room, painting murals for Patrick in his bedroom as he worked outside day after day.
His weight dropped until he was a shadow of his usual self. While Em fought to provide him with the vegetables he needed to survive, baking bread and trying to make do with the limited supplies that they shared with their landlord, in the evenings she sat upstairs in her attic studio designing cushions, pots, anything for Lawrence’s studio. She sent her patterns up to Lawrence in London at every chance she could.
Emma used darker colors as the war drew on—the murky turmoil inside her at how she felt about the world, the tenuous and delicate balance she was trying to maintain with Patrick and Rupert while dealing with Rupert’s growing irritation with her coming out in her work. No matter how hard they all strove to create beauty and peace, she rationalized that Rupert’s intense reactions toward her were also a reaction on his part to all the death in the world. In wartime, everyone wanted to grab life and bottle it every second they could, but at the same time, horrifying reality loomed around them, a terrifying, brewing nightmare.