by John Masters
Deerfield smiled, ‘You are lucky to have an American husband. English husbands hate their wives’ buying clothes for them – especially ties.’
She pouted at him – ‘I know what Johnny likes!’ The doctor’s smile was understanding. He was not married … or perhaps he had married badly when young, and left his wife in Austria. Anyway, he must know what it was like for a girl, the first few months of marriage. She found herself blushing, thinking of the nights of lovemaking, Johnny’s strong body and male hardness in her, her own eager responses.
‘You look happy,’ Deerfield said softly.
‘Oh I am, I am!’ she cried.
His hand crept across the table and covered hers – ‘I am so glad for you,’ he said. ‘But I am older than you, my dear Mrs Merritt … a thousand years older, I feel, when I see your radiant young beauty – so English, so perfect … and I know that marriages are not made in heaven, but on earth … and sometimes young people though very much in love, begin to feel estranged, and cannot understand why. Marriage creates its own problems, as well as its own rewards. It is my profession to solve such problems. I will always be available to you, as a friend.’
She responded to the pressure of his hand, her eyes damp. He was so kind! She said, ‘Thank you so much, Dr Deerfield.’
‘Please call me Charles,’ he said. ‘Charles – an ear to listen to whatever you want to say … a safety valve, if you ever need to blow off steam … even a shoulder to weep on, though I hope it never comes to that.’
Stella found her sherry glass empty. Dr Deerfield signalled a waiter to refill it. ‘I feel I’ve known you so long,’ she sighed. She felt warm inside and out. Dr Deerfield – Charles – was so different from Johnny, but he, too, was a man, a man who understood women, especially her. His hand pressed down, briefly enfolding hers, and briefly, oh so briefly, his finger stroked the inside of her palm, sending a sudden unexpected frisson through all her secret parts. Then the waiter came with the soup.
Volunteer Naomi Rowland, sitting high on the driver’s seat of the big Humber, thought gloomily that her parents were drifting apart because of the war. Her father had lost faith in it, and now thought it must be stopped, at whatever cost; while her mother was as grimly determined as ever that Germany must be defeated, at whatever cost.
Enough of that. She was on duty, and must not let her mind wander. No one was going to call her just a scatterbrained woman dressed up in a uniform. She was a soldier.
A thinking soldier … and this was a waste of petrol. She seldom had more than one passenger, usually some senior officer of the War Office: a smaller car would have done the job, saved fuel, and been more handy in traffic. True, a small car might bog down in the mud of remote lanes while she was trying to find some camp or installation or country house – but that would be very rare. If officers had to visit units or installations more than fifty miles from Whitehall, they usually went by train; and the Home Counties were well equipped with roads, compared with, say, the farther reaches of Cumberland or Inverness-shire.
She changed gear, accelerated to pass a pair of lumbering horsevans, and changed back up again. The Woman’s Volunteer Motor Drivers needed a uniform that would include trousers or breeches for everything except mess dress. They wore trousered overalls now, for maintenance work on the cars in barracks, but when they went out on duty they had to wear this No. 2 dress, with the khaki tunic, skirt down to two inches above the ankle, high buttoned boots and khaki spats, which was all very well when actually driving, but what if you had to change a tyre? Change a sparking plug? Look for an oil leak? She wondered briefly where and when skirts were invented, or allotted to women, as their ‘official’ garb. She knew that women wore trousers in India, and other Muslim countries … in the harem, too, so men obviously admitted them to be feminine there. Why not on … ?
The officer sitting beside her said, ‘You are an excellent driver, Miss Rowland. I can tell that your mind is miles away, yet you are also fully aware of the road and all that is happening on it.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ she said shortly. She had driven Colonel Venable two or three times before. He was a full colonel on the Intelligence staff, in his fifties. His red-banded hat lay on the seat between them, with his short leatherbound cavalry swagger cane and a bulging briefcase. She had learned that his Christian name was Rodney and that his regiment had been the 17th Lancers, the Death or Glory Boys. He was tall, with bushy grey eyebrows, smoothed-back iron-grey hair, and a suave, slightly weary manner. The little finger was missing from his left hand.
He said, ‘Do you know this part of Oxfordshire at all?’
‘No sir,’ she said, ‘I went to Cambridge … Girton.’
‘How interesting! Well, Phyllis Court at Henley keeps an extraordinarily good cellar, and I am a member.’
‘Oh, I know Phyllis Court and Henley,’ she blurted out. ‘We used to go there every year. My father was a Blue.’
‘Ah! Well, is there any reason you shouldn’t join me for a little supper at Phyllis Court before we go back to London?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, sir,’ she said automatically. It was just as she had thought: Venable treating her as a lady, not a soldier-chauffeur. How dared he …?
‘Why not? Surely your Deputy Superintendent – that is the right title, isn’t it? – does not insist that you eat bread and cheese in the car, when away from London, does she?’
‘No, sir, but …’
‘But me no buts, uncle me no uncles,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I have given you an order. I’ll put it in writing, if you like. We shall both be in uniform. It will all be highly official and military … but we shall enjoy a Romanée Conti which is as strong, as healthy, as thoroughly sound and beautiful a wine … as you are a young Englishwoman.’
She felt herself colouring at the compliment; but was about to protest once more when he opened his briefcase, put on a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, and said, ‘Now I must do a few minutes final preparation before I meet this professor, so please excuse me.’
She relapsed into silence. He was good looking, for his age, in a rather cynical way. He was more sophisticated than any man she’d met yet … probably kept mistresses when he was young. And that missing finger … perhaps he’d taken part in the charge at Omdurman … or fought Afridis on the North West Frontier, and heard the bullet down the mountain pass, that whistles low, all flesh is grass …
Susan Rowland sat at the breakfast table in Hill House with the two recently adopted children, one on each side of her. If she’d been English, she’d have hired a nanny for them long since – as soon as she got them – but she was American; and she believed it was her duty to raise them herself, and give them the love and security they had never known in their short lives.
‘Tim,’ she said, ‘take your elbows off the table … eat your porridge in smaller spoonfuls – Sally, sit up straight, there’s a dear.’
Sally sat up, with a wide smile and a murmured ‘Yes’m,’ that was halfway between the ‘Yes, madame’ she had learned to use at the orphanage, and the ‘Yes, Mummy’ that was expected of her now. Susan watched them both with love tempered by anxiety. Tim was about seven and a half, Sally nine: no one knew their real birthdays, so she had given them birth dates, March 1, 1907 for Sally, and September 1, 1908 for Tim. Their mother, a well-known prostitute in south-east London, had been killed during the German air raid on Woolwich of October 13 last year. Their fathers had obviously been different men – for Sally was blonde and sturdy and blue-eyed, while Tim was small and sallow and brown-eyed; but they shared a cautious, wary look in those young, innocent-seeming eyes.
Joan the maid came in, a dedicated spinster in her fifties, and Tim snapped, “Ere, you … sugar!’
Joan stopped and stared, disbelieving her ears. Susan said sharply, ‘Don’t speak like that to anyone, Tim! Say “Please pass me the sugar, Joan.” Go on.’
Tim said, ‘Please pass me the sugar, Joan.’ His voice was now winsome and in
gratiating. Susan saw in his sharp, little face that he did not understand why he could not tell the servants what to do in any way he chose. No one had ever hesitated to tell him, at home or at the orphanage, where he was at everyone’s beck and call, to be shouted at, ordered about, slapped, whipped, shut up … Now, by some miracle, he was on the other side, one of the people who gave the orders.
Joan said, ‘There you are, Ma …’ She bit the word short. She had been about to say ‘Master Tim,’ which was the proper way for her to address her mistress’s small son, but Susan, née Susan Kruze of California, had forbidden the staff to treat the adopted children in the old way. They were to be addressed simply by their Christian names – Tim and Sally – until they were old enough to be treated with respect; then perhaps it would be time to call them Miss Sally and Master Tim.
Sally slipped off the cushions on which she was sitting on her chair, and went to the sideboard to help herself to fried egg and bacon. Joan looked on approvingly and said, ‘Would you like some more milk, Sally?’
‘Yes, please,’ the girl said. ‘Thank you, Joan.’
She was learning manners, Susan thought; or learning what pleased those who could punish her. It was love they had to learn, really, and that would not be easy. They were, underneath, little animals of the human jungle. Where they would really be at home, if it were allowed, would be on the Western Front, living like the rats they had been, in the trenches of the urban war front.
The colonel commanding the depot of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, in Stirling Castle, was tall and gaunt with a sweeping grey moustache and a silver plate in his skull, replacing a piece blown out by a German bullet at Mons. Two of the 2nd Lieutenants of the regiment lined up in front of him were barely nineteen. The third was Archie Campbell, a shortish man of near forty, with dark hair, narrow-set deep-sunken eyes, a broken nose and powerful sloping shoulders. They all gazed at the colonel, backs straight, trying to guess what they had done wrong.
Archie wondered if Fiona had telephoned again, asking whether there was an Archie Campbell at the depot. Last time the adjutant had told her there were five, among the three hundred Campbells; and later had asked Archie whether the lady was a friend of his, and what was he to do if she called again; and Archie had answered, ‘Tell her there’s no Archie Campbell here who knows her.’ But surely the C.O. wouldn’t have him up with the two youngsters about that, even though one of them was also a Campbell?
The colonel said, ‘The battalions of the regiment have been doing well in France and elsewhere, but they have not been suffering the expected casualties. So they do not need the officers we have ready to send out … I have been ordered to find three officers to send to other regiments. Out of many, I have chosen you.’
Campbell hardened his expression. What had they found wrong with him? He’d done his best – the two young ’uns, too, as far as he knew.
The colonel recognized their emotion and said, ‘We’re not trying to get rid of you. I had the adjutant pick the names to go out of a hat. You’re the unlucky ones … You can choose what other regiment you want to go to. A few are in the same boat as we are … don’t need any more officers now – but precious few. You’ll probably get whatever you ask for. So, what are your choices?’
No one spoke for a time. Archie Campbell’s mind was racing. What about the Cameronians, or the Highland Light Infantry, then? He was a Glasgow man and they were Glasgow regiments. One of the Lowland pushes, then – the Royal Scots Fusiliers, King’s Own Scottish Borderers …?
One of the young men said, ‘If I can’t stay here, sir, I’d like to go to the Black Watch.’
‘Very well,’ the colonel said, making a note on a pad.
Archie thought desperately … a Welsh regiment? An Irish one? Rifles? Too damned snooty. They wouldn’t mind him having been a painter – but his dad a coal miner? No, thanks! He didn’t know any other regiment … except one: the Weald Light Infantry.
The second subaltern said, ‘I’d like to go to the Gordons, sir.’
The Wealds … Fiona’s regiment. Fiona’s husband’s regiment, to be exact. Quentin’s. The man whose bed he’d been dishonouring for the past ten years. The man who’d come between himself and Fiona, in image, ever since this bloody war started – because he was out there, fighting, while he, Archie, was back here, fucking.
He said, ‘I’d like to go to the Weald Light Infantry, sir.’
Like? he thought. That’s not true. I must, that’s the truth. There’ll be no peace of mind for me until I’m fighting at his side.
The colonel made another note, and asked, ‘Any particular reason?’
Archie said, ‘Family connections, sir.’
The young man and the young woman walked barefoot on the pebbled beach, under a bright afternoon sun. The little waves crawled up the slope and washed their feet. The turreted baroque mass of Eastbourne pier stretched out to sea half a mile ahead. Beyond the pier towered the white loom of Beachy Head. The fishing and trip boats were drawn up high on the beach, their prows at the edge of the tiled footwalk, the boatmen working on them. Smells of pitch and twine and petrol fumes wafted down the beach into the walkers’ faces. Out to sea smudges of smoke trailed behind a crawling tramp, a hurrying destroyer. A few other couples walked or sat in the May sun, a few children played in the pebbles. The summer season had not begun.
‘Are you glad you’ve been called up at last?’ Betty Merritt asked.
Fletcher Gorse said, ‘Don’t know, really … You get tired of waiting, for anything.’
‘Do you want to go?’
He said, ‘I want to see the war, ’cos I’ll have to write poetry about it. Wish I didn’t have to wear uniform, though.’ He stopped and stared seaward, his hands on his hips. Betty waited, then asked, ‘What are you looking at?’
He jerked his chin, ‘That … all that water. That’s something else to write poetry about, I reckon. I’d like to see it when the wind’s blowing and there’s waves, and water flying about.’
‘A storm at sea!’ she said. ‘You are a romantic, Fletcher.’ She was laughing at him, and he smiled back at her.
He said, ‘I’m a poet, ain’t I?’
They walked on. She said, ‘You’ll be training in Hedlington for some time, won’t you, after you’ve joined up?’
He nodded. ‘At the Barracks. Square bashing. Crawling over the Downs at night playing at soldiers.’
After a while she said, ‘What time will you have off, free?’
‘Dunno. Some of Sundays, likely. Some of Saturdays.’
‘We could come down here again.’
‘Lots of driving, sitting in the car. Better we go to Walstone, and I show you how to run ferrets, and tickle a trout … without falling in the river.’
She threw her head back and laughed, then looked back at him. ‘You’ll write? To tell me when you can come out. We could dance, too. They have dances for soldiers sometimes, I know.’
He said, ‘I’ll write.’ He looked at the sun, the houses, the sea, the sweeping beach, and last at her. Her eyes were soft, her skin like silk, her hair stirring in the little breeze. She was nearly ready. Not quite though; and nor was he … damned strange feeling, that was.
‘We’d better go back now, Betty,’ he said.
The drone of aircraft engines filled the air. The wind, heavily charged with salt, blew in off the sea and tugged at the marsh grass along the eastern edge of the field, where the River Adur meandered into Shoreham and the Channel. Acting Lieutenant Guy Rowland, nineteen years of age a week ago on Shakespeare’s birthday, the day before the Easter Rising in Dublin, sat at the little table in the little hut just off the airfield, reading a letter. It was from his uncle Tom:
So we sit here, or do exercises, day after day, waiting for Scheer to come out and fight. We can’t pass the minefields and unmarked channels, and get into the enemy harbours these days, as Nelson did at the Nile and Copenhagen. We have to pray that something will make the High Seas fleet go
to sea. Sheer boredom, perhaps, or what they think is a chance of cutting off an isolated smaller force of ours, destroying it and returning safe to their bases before we can catch them. We are a real fleet now, a huge one, rather than a collection of ships thrown together and called the Grand Fleet, which we were until recently, I feel. But all we can do is pray that the Germans will come out, a prayer that everyone, from Admiral Jellicoe to the youngest Boy, hopes will become a reality …
He put the letter down with a frown. Uncle Tom was waiting in Scapa Flow, in the Orkneys, off the north coast of Scotland. It was easy to understand why he had to wait: the initiative was with the Germans. But that was not true of himself. He stood up, put on his R.F.C. tunic, the double-breasted so-called maternity jacket, buttoned it up carefully, and checked the polish on his shoes. Major Capling, the school commandant, had been an officer of the Queen’s before he transferred to the R.F.C. and kept all the punctilious polish of that regiment, nicknamed Kirk’s Lambs, or the Guildford Guards.
In the outer office the school adjutant said, ‘What can I do for you, Rowland?’
‘I want to see the C.O., please.’
‘What about?’
‘I want to be sent to a squadron in France.’
The adjutant said, ‘The C.O. is well aware of your position, you know.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ Guy said obstinately, ‘but I’d like to see him, all the same.’
The adjutant, who was an older man with a limp and no wings on his breast, got up, and went into the inner office. A moment later he came out, and beckoned. Guy marched forward, came to a halt, and saluted, his forage cap at just the right angle, the embroidered R.F.C. wings still bright and new on his left breast.
Major Capling said, ‘The adjutant tells me you want to be posted to France, Rowland.’
‘Yes, sir. It’s two months since …’
Capling raised a hand, ‘I know. Don’t think I have not studied your record of service – frequently … You’re not really a good pilot, Rowland, but you are an excellent instructor. I don’t know why, but it’s true. Your own technique and knowledge are improving as you teach others, and soon I hope to post you to France. The date will depend on when I get another instructor posted to me.’