Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  Sam agreed. The three of us caught the Saturday afternoon train from Middle Hill and were in the hotel by four-thirty. The rocking of the train sent Will to sleep almost straightaway, which meant that, as we left for the theater, just after five-thirty, in time for the six o’clock performance, he was wide awake and voicing his displeasure at the novel company he was being required to keep.

  But Sam was firm. She liked what she saw in Blanche and shoved me out of the door right in the middle of one of Will’s crying bursts.

  “He has to get used to the fact that the world doesn’t revolve around him,” she complained as we hurried downstairs and out of earshot.

  “But I thought it did,” I replied. “For now, anyway.”

  She punched me lightly on the arm. “Beast! In Middle Hill, it’s natural. But this is the first night out I’ve had since he was born. It’s new for me and it’s new for him. Am I being a bad mother?”

  My answer got lost as we negotiated the lobby of the hotel and found our way to the theater—it was a fifteen-minute walk.

  I had never been to King Edward VI’s school before, but Sam had and knew the way. The school consisted of some black-and-white timbered buildings, long and low, though the Guild Chapel looked more like a conventional Norman church, square and squat stone with a stocky cube for a tower, and stained-glass windows. It had room for about three hundred and was packed to overflowing.

  Having safely descended the steps down from the chapel for the interval, we found the rim of a stone fountain to sit on and wait. “What’s your verdict so far?” I asked. “You’re the expert.”

  “How I hate that word. But it is one of my favorite plays,” replied Sam. “It places such demands on the man who plays Lear. Although Lear is old, most old actors don’t take it on—it’s too draining.”

  “Do you see anything of your family—your sisters—in Regan and Goneril?”

  She smiled. “Oh no, we get on much better than they do. The psychology is different: we never had a kingdom to fight over.”

  “What do you fight about?”

  “Who says we fight?”

  I had half a bottle of whisky with me and offered it to her. She shook her head. I took a swig.

  “It was just a question. Most families fight about something.”

  But she was shaking her head again. “My father was so awful, that drove us together. Solidarity. We were always watching out for each other. Our mother was so pretty, she and our father must have been in love at the beginning, before we girls came along. She had such plans for us. Meeting Sir Mortimer gave her hope for all of us, though she would never say bad things about our father, not after he—he died. ‘He gave me four lovely daughters,’ she would say.” Sam paused. “Three lovely daughters now and one black sheep, one tart. She would hate the way I’ve turned out.”

  “Sam!” I said.

  She shook her head. “You didn’t know her. She was pretty, bustling, busy, always moving, restless, like these new automobile things when they’ve been cranked into action—you know, the way they rattle, shake, throb with energy and power. Our mother had an engine inside her—but, but, even with Sir Mortimer, she didn’t… you know… they had to wait, until they were married. She told Ruth that she was looking forward to it, but that they had to wait till Captain Smith had married them, all legal. My mother would have closed up after I got pregnant. I would have been shut out, shut out of my own family; my life would have been colder, narrower, the color she brought to the lives of all us girls would have been gone for me.” She looked up at the sky. “I feel out of breath just thinking about it.”

  “And your sisters? How are they? How have they been?”

  She bit her lip. “Ruth and Faye were a bit shocked when I got pregnant—what I mean when I say a ‘bit’ shocked, is that they were very shocked. Shocked, upset, embarrassed, to be frank.”

  “And Lottie?”

  Sam thought for a moment. “Lottie was more understanding. This will sound harsh, Hal, but… Lottie is … well, she is the plain one among the sisters. I know I shouldn’t say that—it sounds cruel and arrogant all at the same time, and I would never say it to her face, of course—but… the fact is she rarely has had boyfriends. The fact is that Lottie loves it when Ruth and Faye have boyfriends—she lives through them, I suppose, enjoys the good times and suffers with them when they get thrown over. And she was the one who most kept in touch when I was pregnant. If she lived nearer she would have babysat tonight.”

  Just then we were called back in for the second half of the play. I didn’t get a chance to follow up until later that evening when we were seated in the hotel dining room after the performance. Quite some time after the performance, as it turned out, since Sam had insisted on going upstairs to check on Will, who was fast asleep, with Blanche beside him, also fast asleep. Sam came down looking contented.

  The dining room was quite busy—it was Saturday night, after all—and the service could have been quicker. But we were staying in the hotel and so were in no hurry. I ordered a bottle of wine and asked Sam what she had thought of the play now that we had seen all of it.

  “Well, I’m glad they had the traditional ending.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ending of Lear—the king dies and his favorite daughter dies, after the other two have killed each other—was never very popular in the early days, and used to be changed, so that Lear doesn’t die and Cordelia marries Edgar, who of course loves her.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh, history. English royalists didn’t like what happened to Charles I and then James—1688 and all that—and Lear reminded them too much of the harsh reality. The traditional ending wasn’t reintroduced until Victorian times. They were certain of their own monarch, so Lear’s ending wasn’t threatening to them.”

  The wine was brought, and the menus, a handwritten card. There was no choice: it was fish, then chicken.

  “You prefer Shakespeare’s tragedies to his comedies?”

  She nodded her head and picked at some bread. “I suppose I do. Tragedy is more real, somehow. It’s not the only mood for the theater, but the dominant one, the most classic. What did you think of the play?”

  “I enjoyed the acting. I can’t imagine Isobel or me ever falling out like Lear’s daughters do.”

  “As I said, you don’t have a kingdom to fight over.”

  “Does that make so much difference?”

  Sam chewed some bread. “Land, money, power… it’s all the same. It corrupts. I’m sure that if my sisters and I hadn’t been so poor, we’d never have got on so well.”

  “You were going to tell me about Lottie.”

  “Was I? What was I going to say, I wonder?”

  I refilled our wine glasses. “You said she was plain—”

  “Oh yes! I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not a nice thing… I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “Do you get on?”

  “Oh yes … it’s more … complicated than that.”

  The fish arrived. We sat back and allowed it to be served.

  “How was it complicated?” I asked when we were starting to eat.

  She chewed for a moment. Then: “Let me ask you a question. Are you your parents’ favorite, or is it your sister? Have you noticed?”

  “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “Then you are the favorite.”

  “How can you say—?”

  Sam’s eyes shone. She was suddenly fired up. “Trust me.” She separated some fish from the bone, chewed, and swallowed. The muscles in her throat moved back and forth. “Believe me, growing up in our family was a lesson to everyone.” She brandished her fork at me. “I’m going to be very honest now. Lottie never noticed it, but she was our parents’ favorite. She got all the little treats, far more than her fair share, anyway. She got more praise than anyone else, the best bit of meat at Sunday lunch—when we had meat; she sat next to our mother on the omnibus, and she was always given that extra something
at Christmas. She was never punished as harshly as the rest of us. We used to steal her treats—and then it was us who got punished, for picking on Lottie! It was monstrous, but that’s the way it was.”

  Sam cut into what was left of her fish. “All the other sisters noticed it—and it hurt. We used to talk about it, to each other, never in front of Lottie, of course, we couldn’t lose face in that way. We would make sarcastic remarks, but she never seemed to take it on board—she just sailed through the early years, and the rest of us swallowed it. Our parents had a soft spot for Lottie and that was that.”

  She drank some water and poured a little more sauce from the jug.

  “Now, here comes the weird bit—and maybe you will have a view about it. As we got older, as first Ruth, then Faye, then Lottie turned ten, and then twelve, boys came into our lives and these things began to matter more and more. And… I know I shouldn’t say this, but Ruth and Faye and, yes, me, though I was still barely eleven, were all reasonably attractive, but Lottie wasn’t. The rest of us didn’t speak about it; nobody spoke about it in the family. But now Lottie started to hurt. And this is my point, or one of my points anyway… that when you are winning, or on the winning side, or in some favored position, success or winning is never as good a feeling as losing or being unsuccessful is horrible. Have you ever noticed that? People who lose feel that loss far more than winners relish winning.”

  “You think that’s true?”

  Sam was nodding. “Yes, I do. I remember my first boyfriend—he could hardly be called the name, we were so young. But I fell for someone else and didn’t think twice about throwing him over. Yet when I was thrown over myself, by boyfriend number two and not so long afterward, I was inconsolable.” She grinned. “Not for very long, I have to admit, but my point is that losing is much more hurtful than winning is pleasurable.”

  “What did you all do about it?”

  Sam speared the remains of her fish with her fork. “We all handled it in a different way. Ruth, from having been a tomboy as a girl, now became quite feminine and took Lottie under her wing. Faye was always rather histrionic and rather flaunted her success with boys.”

  “And you?” I had almost finished my own fish.

  “I suppose I was always the shyest of the three—of all of us, really. It came from being the youngest. It crossed my mind that, although we sisters had never noticed how plain Lottie was as a child, our parents had, and although they never said anything, they had realized early on that she might have a harder life as a grown woman than the rest of us. And that was why they had made her their favorite.”

  Sam drank more water. “It had a big effect on me, that insight, their understanding of family psychology. I understood that parents aren’t so stupid, that you don’t always say what you know, that you think ahead, weigh up what is likely to happen and act on it, that what appears cruel in one light is actually kindness and thoughtfulness in another light. It made me like my mother even more than I did.”

  She put her knife and fork together.

  “But it had another effect on our lives, too. When I got pregnant, Ruth and Faye tried to be understanding but… well, they were shocked, I could tell, no matter how they tried to hide their feelings— Ruth especially. They were shocked. I repeat that I don’t think they thought I was wicked—more foolish. But yes, they were shocked.”

  The fish plates were taken away and the chicken served.

  “But Lottie… Lottie was different again. It was as if… as if I was now the plain one, the fourth of the four, the one everyone else pitied, the one with life stacked against her. I won’t say she was pleased… she was more… well, relieved is how I would describe it.” She smiled but it was a thin smile.

  “And how did you react? To Lottie, I mean.”

  Sam made a face. “I was grateful, to be honest. I felt so … so alone with Wilhelm gone, so cold, so exposed. No one had betrayed me but, yes, I felt betrayed.”

  I let a long pause go by. There was a table of six diners across the room complaining about the food. The noise they were making left us in an anonymous corner of relative silence. The staff had enough on their hands and would come nowhere near us for a while.

  We chewed on our chicken.

  “Why did you do it, Sam?” I said this after a long silence but I had to get it out. It was a natural enough question. “I can understand you sleeping with Wilhelm—of course I can. But… why take the risk of getting pregnant? There are ways … ways of doing these things … You’ve been to college … you must have known… Did he—?”

  “No! Stop!” It was a sigh, a cry, a sob, and a choking sound in the same breath. She snatched at her wine glass and held it to her lips, hiding as best she could for a moment.

  A long pause, longer than the one I had let elapse. Tears glistened around the rim of her eyelids. “It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him! He didn’t force me, I mean. Not at all. Oh no!”

  She took a deep breath, swallowed a huge chunk of air. Again I watched the muscles of her throat ripple and the upper, visible parts of her breasts swell.

  Like her mother, Sam had an engine inside her. Her skin glowed.

  “We had rented a long boat—a narrow boat, whatever they are called—and were sailing for a weekend on the canals. Nobody asks if you’re married or not in that world. It had been a gorgeous day, a day of birds and buzzing insects and the sound of running water as locks opened and closed, the smell of the other boats’ exhausts as they chugged past, with all their brightly painted weird names. We had stopped for lunch at a pub next to a lockkeeper’s cottage and we did the same for dinner—another lock, another lockkeeper’s cottage, another pub next to it.

  “This one was quite rowdy, however. It was late, people had been drinking, and they started arguing, arguing about the Germans, about how belligerent and militaristic they are, how they were building up their forces, their navy, how the Kaiser was a tyrant. You can imagine.”

  She bit her lip.

  “I was angry, fearful, and embarrassed all at the same time, for Wilhelm. No one knew he was German, of course; he had the sense not to say anything but gave me a sign, and we left. We didn’t speak until we were well out of earshot of the pub and nearly back at the boat. I started to apologize but he stopped me. He said it was just the same in Germany, that the Germans were just as anti-English as the English were anti-German, and that we should ignore it.

  “There was a moon and we went for a walk along the canal bank, to calm down. We eventually returned to the boat and sat inside for a while, having a last whisky and talking. We were amazed that we could feel the way we did about each other, when everybody else in Britain and Germany was at each other’s throats. I must say, Hal, it was wonderful, bewildering—and, yes, anxiety-making all at the same time.”

  The upper half of her breasts swelled again.

  “After a while, Wilhelm went onto the deck for a smoke. I changed into my nightdress. Then he called to me. ‘Sam,’ he sort of whispered. ‘Come out here. Come and look at this.’

  “I went out on deck. While we had been talking, the moon had risen in the sky but, more than that, a mist had formed over the canal. It was as if the canal was steaming and the steam was shining—it was made silver-yellow, silver-gold, by the glow of the moon. And the best part is: we were cut off by the mist. It had closed in around us, silently, secretly, and when you blinked you felt its wetness on your cheeks and eyelashes.”

  She bit her lip again, thinking back.

  “Wilhelm put his arm around me, and as we stood there, enveloped in the mist, we suddenly heard a flapping, a beating, a leathery sound, and two swans flew straight past us, very low above the water, and very close. They came out of the mist—and were gone back into it in no time.

  “Wilhelm didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The mere sight of the swans, the fact that there were just two of them, was enough.

  “He kissed me. I was wearing just my nightdress, very thin. He put his mouth on mine—and th
en he put his mouth on my breast. Oh, Hal!”

  Those words went through me.

  “What did I feel? No one’s ever written about what I felt. Ever. And no one told me what to expect, not my mother, not Ruth or Faye or Lottie, not anyone. You read poetry and they make feelings, feelings of love, of tenderness, of intimacy, seem so beautiful, so … lovely. But they are … observing, they are outside, their words can be so … limiting”

  Now she let out a breath.

  “That’s not what I felt that night. ‘Lust’ is a horrible word, I think. I had been in love with Wilhelm for some time by then, but that night, that night… that night, for the first time, I wanted him. When he put his mouth on my breast, I remember that I cried out. To begin with it was surprise, but it immediately turned into something else. A wave swept through my nerves, my flesh was flushed with blood, gorged, and I wanted to wrap my arms and legs around him and squeeze all the juices out of his body and into mine. No one’s ever written about that! I wanted him to put his hands and lips and tongue all over me. I was sweating, crying—but in pleasure. I had sensations, more like anticipations in my body, in parts of my body that I had never felt before, or even known I could feel.”

  Sam was blushing now but her eyes still shone: she had to tell someone. This had been bottled up for too long.

  “We lay on the deck of the narrow boat. The mist was all around us, but because of the moon it was a source of light as well as a cloak. My body was filled with fire, but fire as a tide—it rose through my body, swept across my skin. And then, and then … I was released.”

  Her breathing quieted.

  “I don’t think any of my sisters have been through that.”

  “Have you told them?”

  She shook her head. “I tried. Faye listened, but not the others, not really. They probably thought I was being sentimental.”

  A waitress came at last to clear the plates away. It was getting late and we both decided to limit ourselves to coffee, though I also asked for a whisky.

  “So, in a sense, you were unlucky.”