Aunt Letitia

by Dominic Luke

The train jerked to a halt once more. They had finally left London behind. Hugh looked out at a field of green wheat. A blue sky arched overhead, smudged with grey cloud. The branches of an elm swayed in the breeze. There was so much inside his head, and so little of it that he could let out. Megan would not be interested in his love. And as for the Germans, he knew but could not tell anyone that for now London was reprieved. Decoded Enigma messages had revealed the Luftwaffe had gone East: Hitler’s next target was the Soviet Union.

  Chapter Seven

  WHEN HUGH RETURNED to London that summer on a flying visit, he found Aunt Letitia back on her feet, getting out and about again. She used a walking stick now, he noted, but in essentials she seemed to be back to her old self.

  Megan Kramer was still around. As far as Hugh could tell, she called now as a friend rather than in a professional capacity. That his aunt and Megan should be friends seemed incongruous to Hugh at first: they were separated by age, by class, by everything. Yet in other ways they were similar: vigorous, independent, not afraid to voice their opinions. Aunt Letitia, as Hugh had long known, was kind, compassionate, generous: even that old trout Mrs Mansell had been won over. It came as no surprise that Megan should like her too. As for Megan, there was something beguiling about her, something out of the ordinary: Hugh had never been able to put his finger on it.

  He remembered how, at the age of five, he had been captivated by her, had never met anyone like her. The Lambton boys, too, had fallen under her spell. Hugh had competed with them, trying to please her, to serve her in any way he could. The jealousy he had felt back then was still vivid in his mind – so powerful even after all this time that he wondered how his five-year-old self had been able to contain it. He had lain awake at The Firs, clutching Raggety Peg to his chest and telling her in a whisper all the ways he had devised to rid himself of his rivals: pushing them down the well at the Manor, locking them in the attic at The Firs, or sending them away to be killed by the wicked Boers.

  He could not say any of this to Megan. What, then, could he say? Did she want him to say anything? But he could not let his visit pass without making some sort of effort, futile though it might prove.

  His imagination ran ahead. He conjured up an intimate restaurant, candlelight, a gentle piano in the background and the two of them picking up where they had left off. But it did not turn out like that at all. She was busy, could spare only a half-hour, suggested a walk. Thus they came to be strolling in the summer sunshine as the war raged on unabated, the Wehrmacht advancing hundreds of miles at a time in the Soviet Union, capturing Lvov, Minsk and Smolensk, taking millions of prisoners, bombing Moscow from the air; while in the desert a lull in the fighting did not mean that Ian was out of danger.

  Those battlefields seemed impossibly remote in the somnolent heat of Hyde Park, with the smell of grass invoking pre-war memories of picnics and languid games of tennis; yet all round were reminders of war: broken buildings, people in uniform, barrage balloons in the sky. Megan seemed at ease with the silence between them, walked with assurance, her heels clicking rhythmically on the path. She wore her hat at an angle and her hair, once straight, was now done in a permanent wave. Hugh would have liked to examine her from top to toe, to catalogue everything that was different and everything that was the same, but he was too shy to take more than an occasional glance, as diffident and unsure of himself as he’d been at fifteen – the only saving grace being that he no longer blushed so readily.

  When they began to talk at last, they talked about Aunt Letitia: a safe subject.

  ‘It seems a strange quirk of fate,’ said Megan, ‘that has led me to become acquainted with Mrs Warner after such a long time. You can’t imagine how I envied you when I was seven. There was I up at the Manor where everything was oh-so-proper and Mrs Lambton only had eyes for her boys; and there were you at the homely Firs with a lovely old aunt who made time for everyone and lavished affection on you. I didn’t think it at all fair!’ She laughed, stirring in Hugh memories of London in 1912; but then she said, ‘All that is ancient history. Let us bring ourselves up to date.’

  That was easier said than done. Hugh could not tell her much about his hush-hush job in Buckinghamshire, and Megan spoke only in general terms about her own work. He wanted very much to ask about her husband, the mysterious Mr Kramer who was never mentioned, but he hadn’t plucked up courage before Megan suddenly said, ‘Tell me about your wife. I heard somewhere that you’d married. The Times, perhaps.’

  There was nothing hush-hush about his marriage, but when it came to it he found it as difficult a subject as his job. What could he say about Cynthia?

  Once upon a time he had been besotted with Cynthia: by her gentleness and innocence and school-girl charm; and he’d been touched by the tears she shed when he told her he would not marry anyone until after the war. In those days – the spring of 1918 – after the war signified a vague and distant point far in the future: perhaps years away, perhaps never. People had already been talking about the 1919 offensive. No one had predicted that the terrible slaughter would end so suddenly that very November.

  The Armistice, demobilization, marriage: these events had pointed to a fresh start. Hugh had felt as if he’d aged ten years in the trenches, but when the nightmare had come to an end he had woken up and found that he was still only twenty-two. The world was full of peace and promise. He was set fair to live happily ever after.

  Looking back more than twenty years later, he was cynically amused by that younger Hugh’s gullibility. He felt there must have been clues that he missed, indications he ignored, pointers that might have warned him of what was to come. Disillusionment had been quick to set in. Cynthia had been unhappy in the house he had bought in Northamptonshire which was, she had said over and over again, too small, with too few servants, and too far away from her friends. Those friends, Hugh soon discovered, were a ghastly set: snobs, profiteers, incipient Fascists. None of them had been closer to the front than the comfortable chateaux which had served as staff headquarters. They were malcontents, too, outraged that the war’s end did not signify a return to Edwardian opulence and rigid class distinctions. When the Labour Party formed a government in 1924, they spoke of it as the thin end of the wedge and warned of an impending Bolshevik revolution. The Zinoviev letter only served to prove their point.

  Hugh had been appalled by those people. He could find no common ground with them. That had not helped things between him and Cynthia. But what had really undermined the marriage was Cynthia’s antipathy to what she termed Hugh’s pestering her. It had come as a shock to Hugh that a woman who had nursed soldiers for two years could still be so sexually ignorant. She found Hugh’s advances repellent. She had tolerated them to start with, accepted that it was a wife’s duty, but Ian’s birth had changed all that. She would never ever, she’d announced, put herself through such an ordeal again. Hugh was banished to the spare room. Cynthia’s bedroom door remained resolutely shut. Two years into his marriage, Hugh began to suspect he had made the biggest mistake of his life, but there had been nothing to do but carry on, make the best of a bad job, for Ian’s sake if nothing else. And so the marriage, fatally wounded, died a long slow death.

  To explain any of this to Megan seemed out of the question. It was all too close to the bone. And no doubt Megan had made a success of her own marriage which would make him feel even worse. But he had to say something, offer some account of himself.

  ‘My wife and I are … separated.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was for the best.’

  She sounded like she meant it, that she really was sorry; but he didn’t want her sympathy and he didn’t want to dwell on the subject of Cynthia. He searched for something else.

  ‘It’s … strange … that you’re a doctor.’

  ‘Does it really seem so incredible?’

  ‘It’s not what I would have … well, predicted.’

  ‘And what would you have predicted?’

  The
y were up another blind alley. Every opening led to fresh difficulties, embarrassment, confusion. All the questions he wanted to ask seemed impossible. How had she found the money to study, to qualify? How had she contrived to get by all these years? He remembered her threadbare clothes, her single room. He remembered, too, the tommy in no-man’s land: she put on a good performance, if you know what I mean; and afterwards I palmed me money back…. That suggested one way at least in which she might have earned her keep. In 1912, Hugh had not thought to wonder how Megan survived. Her poverty had been part of the charm, part of the adventure: like Marie Antoinette playing at peasants. It was years before he realized – before it actually struck home – that an unearned income was the exception rather than the rule. And then, in 1917, the tommy had unwittingly provided an explanation which Hugh had not wanted to hear – which he had thrust to the back of his mind – but which had festered there, tainting all his memories of Megan, yet never destroying them entirely.

  ‘I suppose you think the medical profession should not be for the likes of me,’ said Megan, breaking a silence of which Hugh had barely been aware.

  ‘No, of course I don’t think that, it’s just …’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘I never expected—’

  ‘Never expected to see me again?’

  ‘I wanted to see you. I never stopped thinking about you.’

  ‘But you just disappeared without a word.’

  ‘I was … confused. My father had just died and I couldn’t … couldn’t….’

  ‘And then not so much as a letter or postcard, nothing. What was I meant to think?’

  ‘I … I felt guilty if you must know.’

  ‘Guilty?’

  ‘Guilty about what we’d done. It was … sinful.’

  ‘And that’s all it was to you, something sinful, something to run away from? And I suppose you thought I was to blame, I was the siren who had lured you from the path of righteousness. It’s always the woman who’s at fault.’

  Hugh was appalled by the direction the conversation had taken, cringed under the amused glance of a passing Wren who obviously thought she was witnessing a lovers’ tiff. He had given Megan the wrong impression. She did not realize how he had cherished those few heady days in 1912, how they meant more to him than almost anything. And yet he had felt guilty in the aftermath, struggling to come to terms with all that had happened: his adventure with Megan, his father’s death. In the turmoil of his mind, the two events had somehow become linked as he sought for explanations of the tragedy of Titanic. He remembered sitting in the library at Overton, wanting to be alone, wrestling with his thoughts. He had by chance come across a book by his great-grandfather the Bishop that described the evil temptations of women, their lack of moral fibre, their propensity for leading men astray, the punishment of God on those who transgressed. It had seemed to fit at the time, it had seemed to offer a solution.

  Another silence had fallen between them; their steps had slowed; they seemed now to be walking aimlessly. They passed an elderly couple sitting on a bench, reading from the same newspaper, leaning in to one another. Hugh looked at them, then looked away. Sunlight glinted on the Serpentine. It was hot, breathless. Hugh’s clothes hung heavy, stifling him, his shirt clinging, damp with sweat.

  It was all going wrong. Instead of getting reacquainted with Megan he was finding out just how little he knew about her – about the real Megan, not the one who had haunted his dreams for thirty years. They were getting further apart with every step.

  They drifted to a halt, standing hesitant on the path, looking ahead, looking back, looking up at the blue of the sky: looking anywhere but at each other. But after a while he found his eyes drawn to her, watched her smooth her skirt absently, her fingers long, thin, unadorned.

  ‘I tried to find you,’ she said at last. ‘After the war started – the last war. I wrote a letter, I sent it your aunt.’

  ‘But I never …’ Hugh’s mind, working stodgily in the heat, seemed to recall some talk of a letter: a letter that was never answered. Hadn’t Aunt Letitia said something about it last time he’d come up to London? He hadn’t been listening properly, worried about her, worried about work: it had seemed unimportant. Now, slowly, he pieced the story together.

  ‘I never knew. I never knew about the letter. Aunt Letitia didn’t tell me, until now.’

  Megan glanced at him – the briefest of looks – as if unsure whether to believe him or not, but whatever she read in his face seemed to convince her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s something, I suppose. I always assumed you’d snubbed me.’

  ‘No, I would never … I mean, I didn’t….’

  He was still looking at her hand, she was still smoothing her skirt – and suddenly it struck him that there was no ring.

  ‘You’ve been … been married for a long time?’

  ‘Not very long, actually. His name is Heinrich. He’s German.’

  ‘One of the enemy.’ He blurted it out before he could stop himself.

  ‘Hardly. He is a refugee. A victim of the Nazis.’

  She turned abruptly, began retracing their steps and for a moment Hugh stayed put, watching her walk away. He could just let her go. It would be easy. And it seemed predestined, somehow, that she would leave him again sooner or later. And why not, when all he did was put his foot in it? It would be a relief in a way: not to have to walk on eggshells, not to have measure his words – not to have to try so hard. But then he shook himself, ran to catch up. It might be hopeless, but he’d see it through, not leave himself with any room for regret.

  They walked side-by-side in silence for a while, then Megan said, as if to herself, ‘We thought it might help if Heinrich had a British wife. We thought it would give him a better chance, avoid the risk of being deported.’

  We, thought Hugh: who was we? ‘And did it help?’

  ‘It didn’t stop him from being driven off at dawn one morning in a Black Maria. He is interned on the Isle of Man.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hugh, who wasn’t. With any luck, this Heinrich person would be locked up for the duration – longer, if possible. A German was a German. ‘It must be … upsetting for you.’

  ‘It’s the injustice if it that rankles. Heinrich was opposing the Nazis when we were still appeasing them. But I can’t really pass myself off as a grass widow. The marriage was purely one of convenience.’

  ‘A marriage of convenience? Then you’re…?’ Hugh tried to keep the sudden hope out of his voice. He was jumping too far ahead. It would probably turn out to be another mirage. But he did now allow himself to feel some sympathy for Heinrich – and that surely would recommend him to Megan. ‘Your … husband. A refugee, you said. A Jew?’

  ‘A communist. At least, he used to be a communist. I rather think he changed his mind about that around about the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He couldn’t stomach what he was being told by Comintern. He knows at firsthand what the Nazis are like whereas we, for all our propaganda, do not.’

  Hugh squirmed, another pitfall opening before him as he remembered his time in Germany in the twenties. He’d felt a certain distaste for the Nazis back then, but he’d been blind to what they were really like. No doubt Heinrich – that paragon Heinrich – no doubt even back then he—

  Megan was still talking. ‘… and now that Hitler has invaded Russia, I expect Moscow has changed its tune – not that Heinrich will be inclined to swallow Comintern’s line so easily in future.’

  All this talk of marriages of convenience, communism, the Comintern: it was as if another illusion was being peeled away and Hugh was seeing another Megan, cold, calculating, strongly political. Yet perhaps she’d always been like that, perhaps her beauty had blinded him. Had she not smashed windows in the name of female emancipation in 1912? One could not get much more militant than that.

  ‘You’re a Communist, then?’ said Hugh dully.

  ‘Good grief, no!’ Megan looked startled at the sugges
tion. ‘I’m a paid-up member of the Labour Party, if you must know – though that is seen as tantamount to communism in certain circles.’ She glanced at him sidelong, wary. ‘What about you? I seem to remember hearing or reading – I may have got this wrong – that your wife was mixed up with Mosley’s lot?’

  ‘Cynthia and I have gone our separate ways in politics as in everything else.’ The hope which had leapt in Hugh’s heart just minutes before was now extinguished as he remembered how mistaken he’d been about Cynthia – how mistaken he was about everything. ‘I can’t imagine how we ever found enough in common to want to get married.’

  Megan said nothing and they walked on for a time before coming to a halt, avoiding each other’s eyes as before, standing in silence. Except that this silence had a different quality, there was a background hum and bustle. Looking round, Hugh realized they had left the park, were standing in Knightsbridge. The moment of parting loomed suddenly near.

  ‘Well …’ said Hugh, tongue-tied.

  Megan smiled, a little sadly it seemed. ‘This has not been a success, has it?’

  ‘It’s been … I’ve enjoyed … we should … try again. Try again.’

  ‘But everything is so uncertain. We are no longer in control of our own destinies. In a month or so, Russia will fall and then Hitler will turn his attention back to us. Who knows what will happen then? It’s not a time for beginnings.’

  ‘This is not a beginning. It began long ago, in Warwickshire, when we were children.’

  ‘Oh Hugh.’ That smile again: valedictory was the word. She was slipping from his grasp just as she had always done in his dreams, carried away like Raggety Peg on a rain-swollen stream.

  He watched her walk off in the direction of Hyde Park Corner, dwindling into the crowds. He had not told her how he felt – how did he feel? – he had learned virtually nothing, did not even know where she lived. It had not been a success, as she had said. He had wild ideas of running after her, taking her in his arms, saying, ‘I love you!’, or simply kissing her, but it was not the way he was made. Sensible, cautious, boring: that was him, always had been.