‘We should do a book about women in the war; we could call it New Lives for Old,’ Celia said, and LM agreed, adding that she often wondered if there were any circumstances in which Celia would not want to commission a book. Celia said she couldn’t think of any.
The cleaners had all left, and they had to do the work themselves. Some of the more junior girls had refused, had said they hadn’t come to work in an office to do cleaning; Celia said firmly that if they couldn’t do it, she would, and swept and dusted so ostentatiously around their desks that they gave in and said they would help after all, as long as it was reflected in their wages, otherwise they’d be doing two jobs for the same money. Celia said she was doing about a dozen, but she knew it was hardly a fair comparison. She and LM were, despite punitive taxation – six shillings in the pound now – still rich by absolute standards, still went home to a large comfortable, if cold, house, and a cooked meal, often with fresh meat and vegetables brought from Ashingham. The food shortage was much worse again, despite rationing; there were reports that January of up to four thousand people in a queue at Smithfield, and as many as one million people queuing every week in London alone.
But there was an additional anxiety which haunted her most hopeful days, and that was over the viability of her relationship with Oliver and the fact that he no longer seemed to desire her physically. She would lie awake, staring into the darkness each night, alone in her bed, remembering how she had lain with him, being loved by him night after night, felt his mouth on hers, welcomed him into her, into her greedy body, ridden him, ridden her pleasure, heard herself crying out with it, lain afterwards, gratefully sated, listening to him telling her he loved her.
That last time he had come home, he had scarcely kissed her, apart from a grazing on the lips now and then; she could scarcely bear to think about it now, knowing she might never see him again. He had turned away from her in bed each night, and fallen exhaustedly asleep; in the morning, hopeful that he would welcome it, that he was not so tired, she would put out a tentative hand, a hungry mouth, but he hurried out of bed with some excuse or another and went to the bathroom, to emerge dressed, and avoiding her eyes. He repeatedly said he loved her still; but he didn’t seem to want her. As well as feeling hurt and rejected, she felt physically frustrated and irritable. She would wake from other dreams, sexually explicit rather than horrific, her body throbbing with desire, or worse, a half-orgasm which left her more wretched than before. She had tried to talk about it, to ask him what it was, but he cut her off.
‘Don’t, Celia, I beg of you. I simply cannot bear it. I am sorry: I don’t want to say any more about it than that.’
She had begun to find herself over those past few months, indeed, until the news of his being wounded had reached her, looking at other men with a predatory eye: seeking reassurance, if nothing else, that she had not become ugly, unattractive. She half-wished, half-feared that Jack would come home again; this time it would not be so easy to resist him.
Some of the men at Ashingham were charming, and one in particular, tall, dark and extremely handsome, had lost an eye at Passchendaele and been a successful barrister in that dreamlike former life they had all led. He loved to talk to her, and he made her laugh; she would sit with him occasionally if she had the time, and could escape from the children. One evening she found a bottle of claret in her father’s cellar, and took it to his room. They drank it over exchanged confidences; he had loved his wife very dearly, had come home on leave and found her in bed with someone else.
‘I thought I would like to kill them both and then myself; and I could have done, I had got very used to killing, I was not the civilised fellow who went away in 1914. But – in the end I walked away, I didn’t have enough passion left in me.’
‘It seems to kill passion, war,’ Celia said sadly, ‘sexual passion that is,’ and then looked hastily into her glass, realising what she had said.
He looked at her for a moment and then said very gently, ‘It does, you know. You are out there, thinking of your wife and how you love her, remembering loving her, and somehow the brutalisation that has taken place comes between you and that memory. It’s hard to explain. Don’t despair, Celia. You are all we have left, you know. We need you so badly.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘Oh dear, this is the claret talking, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
Somehow that conversation calmed her, restored her loyalty and her faith in Oliver. A few days later her mother teased her about it.
‘I know what you’re up to. I haven’t been watching Beckenham for forty-five years for nothing. Don’t blame you either, he’s extremely good-looking.’
‘Don’t tell anyone will you?’ said Celia laughing.
‘No, of course not. I’ve learned to keep my counsel. And not telling anyone anything whenever possible is the secret of a happy marriage, in my experience.’>
Celia, remembering suddenly the story of George Paget, looked at her. ‘Mama? Was it true – about—’
Lady Beckenham put her head back and roared with laughter. ‘George? Oh yes. Absolutely. Kept me sane, through all the housemaids. And the Beckenhams born on the wrong wide of the blanket—’
Celia had never considered this. ‘No! Really?’
‘Oh yes. Your father was never very keen on birth control. Dotted about the county they are. We’ve had to support at least three of the little buggers. Well, not so little now. One girl threatened a lot of trouble. We had to buy her off. Couldn’t actually admit it of course, not openly. Said we liked to take care of our staff, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh. Goodness, I never realised.’
‘Good. I hope not many people did. No, I was very fond of George. And he of me. His wife knew, of course, but she hated sex, so it suited her. Perfectly good arrangement all round.’
‘Yes. Yes, I see.’ Celia was silent; the pragmatic approach to marriage of her mother’s generation had always intrigued her. She wondered what she would do, if she found someone else overwhelmingly attractive; or indeed if Oliver failed ever to desire her again. Both were unimaginable, of course. Absolutely unimaginable.
‘I think he must be dead,’ she said flatly to LM on the tenth day. ‘He would have written himself by now, got news to me somehow. It’s the only explanation.’
‘Is it? Is it really? I imagine things must be very confused out there, so many battles, so many casualties—’
‘Yes, yes, I know. But one of the things the VADs do is write letters. It’s one of their jobs. So even if he was – very sick,’ she hesitated, took a deep breath – ‘or really very badly injured, he would get one of them to write. I know he would.’
‘But, Celia he might be too ill for that.’
‘LM, if he was too ill for that he would be dead by now. Conditions out in those hospitals are dreadful. Simply because they are so overworked, and ill-equipped.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I was talking to a VAD the other day. She’d been sent home because she had been injured herself, driving an ambulance. She says it’s appalling out there. She’s not supposed to talk about it of course, it’s bad for morale and it upsets people. But she was visiting someone at Ashingham, and she just started telling me, and then quite clearly she couldn’t stop. I – well I didn’t tell you before. She said they were often confronted by dreadfully injured men at the emergency station, but could offer them little more than first aid. Bandages, a little antiseptic, a drink of water. That was until they got to the proper military hospital, an agonising two-hour drive away or more. She said sometimes she was overcome with panic, wanted to run away. Even at the hospital, the men often face a long wait before they’re treated. The surgeons are working round the clock. Literally, sometimes dropping with exhaustion.’ She giggled suddenly. ‘Do you know, she told me about one surgeon who operated permanently with a cigarette in his mouth. Every so often some ash would drop down on to the patient, and he would say, “Don’t fuss, it’s sterile.” We must get all that into the war diaries, t
oo. Anyway, that doesn’t bode too well for Oliver’s chances.’
‘God, how dreadful,’ said LM: thinking of another soldier in another field hospital, praying as she did almost every day that he had truly died instantly, had known nothing.
‘Yes. So don’t try and make me think he’s all right, LM, because I know he can’t be. It’s impossible. I’d rather not hope, quite honestly. It’s better for me not to try. Oliver’s dead. I know he is.’ There was a silence: she looked down at her wedding ring, twisting it on her finger. Then she took a deep breath, and looked at LM, her eyes full of tears, but managing to smile. ‘How would you fancy a night out?’
‘A night out? Well – well yes, I suppose it would be—’
‘We could go to the Old Vic. You know it’s never closed. Apparently it’s worth going just to hear Lilian Baylis’s speech if there’s a raid. She just won’t have anyone walking out. She comes on to the stage and says, “Will those who wish to leave please do so at once. We are carrying on.” Of course hardly anyone leaves. We certainly wouldn’t would we? Let’s go, it would cheer me up. Sybil Thorndike’s playing in Richard the Second. I’d so love to see her. Are you game?’
LM said she was game.
‘Good. I’ll try and get tickets at lunchtime. Now I must do some work. These proofs have more and more mistakes in them. Typesetting does seem to be one thing men are better at than women.’
Barty thought she had never been so happy. For the first time in her life, she felt she belonged somewhere. She loved living in the country, loved walking across the fields and through the woods, making up stories in her head which she then wrote down and sent to Wol, loved her duties on the estate, collecting eggs, haymaking – it had been a good summer, there had been a lot to do – loved her lessons with Miss Adams. The twins were really quite nice these days: a healthy terror for their grandmother kept them under control, and they took their duties very seriously, caring for Soot, and the small dish-faced New Forest pony called Horace. He was ostensibly for all the children but actually only ridden by them and little Jay, since neither Barty nor Giles had any interest in horses.
The twins were extraordinarily beautiful children, with gleaming dark hair and huge brown eyes, small and almost doll-like; still almost eerily identical and absolutely inseparable. They always spoke in the First person plural: ‘We don’t like porridge, we hate arithmetic, we didn’t fall off Horace today, we have brushed Soot.’ The patients adored them; the twins cheered them all up. Long acclimatised now to the men’s injuries, they would stand by legless or armless men, tell them what they had been doing that day, sing them songs, ask them about the war and whether they had known their father. Even the poor souls suffering from shellshock were cheered by their blithe unself-consciousness ; Lady Beckenham stood one afternoon, watching from the house, as Venetia held one hand of a violently shaking man and Adele the other, both of them smiling encouragingly into his face and telling him he would soon feel better.
‘Jolly good, what you did for that poor chap this morning,’ she said to them later, and the next time Celia came down she told her she could be proud of them. ‘It’ll stand them in good stead in life all this,’ she said, ‘you see if it doesn’t.’
Barty and Giles were still great friends; he was getting very grown-up now, he seemed to have grown inches every time he came home. He liked school now, he told her, he would be quite sad to leave.
‘Well why do you have to, can’t you stay?’ she asked, and he looked at her in a slightly superior way and said surely she knew that when you were thirteen you went to your public school. Barty said no she didn’t know and she wouldn’t have asked the question if she did.
Giles looked at her again and then put his hand on her arm and said, ‘Sorry, Barty, sorry. Shall we go for a walk, and dam that stream we found the other day?’
She said she’d like that and jumped up and said she’d race him to it. Then they dammed the stream, their friendship ostensibly quite restored; but such episodes, rare as they were nowadays, did remind her, that she was not quite like he was, that there was still a gulf between them, and nothing could ever close it.
But best of all was having Billy with her: all the time, another member of her family, a person of her own. She no longer felt estranged, lost to them all, but confident and happy. Billy was happy, too, working extremely hard, although with great difficulty; the wooden leg was ill-fitting and uncomfortable. He fell over constantly in the slippery yard, either when he was struggling to walk without his crutch, or when the crutch itself slipped. Consequently he was always covered with bruises and grazes, but he never complained, clambering up again, refusing help.
‘I won’t be a charity case,’ he would say fiercely, ‘if I can’t do me job, I’ll have to leave again.’
Lady Beckenham respected this, criticising his work quite harshly if it was not up to her extremely high standards. ‘That horse is still muddy there, look, behind his withers,’ she would say, ‘I don’t call that grooming, Billy. Do it again.’ Or ‘That headcollar still isn’t fastened properly, I’ve shown you twice, for heaven’s sake, what’s the matter with you?’ And he would stand there scarlet-faced, biting his lip, but he never made excuses, never asked for special treatment, even when he sprained his wrist and had to wear it in a sling for a few days.
‘I can manage,’ he said furiously to Sheila, the groom, when she offered to do the water troughs for him. ‘I can manage perfectly all right.’
And Barty could see that indeed he could.
‘Oh dear. These are awful,’ said Celia aloud.
She was sitting at her desk, looking at the sales figures for the previous three months. They were indeed awful. The only successes were Dispatches and the new poetry anthology: everything else, the dictionaries and reference books, the reprints of the classics, even the children’s books, were doing badly, hardly breaking even. They hadn’t done any popular fiction this quarter of course, that would have helped: but – these figures would only just cover their overheads, never mind make any kind of a profit. What on earth was she going to do, what could she pull out of her extremely threadbare hat that would save Lyttons? Perhaps, she thought, with something that was closer to a sob than a sigh, perhaps it was as well Oliver wasn’t coming back. What would he think of her, having entrusted her with it, leading a successful business straight downhill to bankruptcy? Well she hadn’t – yet. She just had to find a way through this. Somehow. Stupid to neglect the popular fiction. She knew why: it was because she’d been so busy, doing everything herself, she hadn’t had time to sit back and plan. Well, that must change. Now. At once. She would spent the rest of the morning simply working out strategy. She picked up the telephone on her desk.
‘No calls, Mrs Gould. Nobody at all.’
‘Very well, Lady Celia. But—’
‘No buts. No calls. No visitors.’
‘Sorry,’ said a voice. A most beautiful, musical, resonant voice, an actor’s voice, ‘too late. You have one.’
Celia looked up; in front of her stood the most glorious looking man she had ever seen. He had dark gold hair and brilliant, very dark blue eyes, with surprisingly thick eyebrows; he was not especially tall, not quite as tall as Oliver, and quite heavily built, with very broad shoulders. His features were absurdly perfect: he looked, indeed, rather like a film star, a cross, she thought wildly, between Douglas Fairbanks and a blond version of the new Latin sensation, Rudolph Valentino. He was wearing an officer’s greatcoat, over what appeared to be an ordinary dark grey suit, and when he walked forward, holding out his hand, she noticed that he limped quite badly.
‘Sebastian Brooke,’ he said, smiling at her, a most wonderful, wide, generous smile, ‘my agent tells me you are looking for a children’s book. I have written one. May I tell you about it?’
For the rest of her life Celia remembered that morning: not just because of Sebastian Brooke’s spellbinding presence, nor because of the magical tale he had written, a fantasy called
Meridian, a work of such charm and humour and originality that she could not believe someone else had not already bought it; nor even because of the extraordinary moment when Janet Gould rang through, and said: ‘Lady Celia there’s—’ and she had cut her short and said, ‘Mrs Gould, I told you no calls, no matter who they are from,’ and Mrs Gould said, ‘But Lady Celia this is from your mother,’ and she had said, thinking it was about Billy or Barty or the twins, ‘Oh God,’ and asked Sebastian Brooke to excuse her, and picked up the phone, and her mother had said, talking very fast, rather like a telegram, lest the crucial part of the conversation should not get over fast enough, ‘Celia, it’s Oliver. He’s all right, in hospital, recovering, no loss of limb, shrapnel wounds to the stomach, coming home as soon as he can be moved’. Nor even because of the way she burst into tears and then started laughing helplessly, almost hysterically, and had stood up and asked Sebastian Brooke to excuse her, while she went to her sister-in-law’s office, nor even because of seeing LM in tears of joy and relief herself, and feeling even in her happiness a sense of poignancy at her courage and generosity. She remembered that morning forever afterwards because, for the first time since she had set eyes on Oliver, all those years before, another man had driven him, albeit briefly, absolutely out of her head and her heart, and even managed to make her forget, just for a while, her grief at his presumed death.
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