Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  Sam didn’t know that Wilhelm had been in Paris, where he had promised to take her, at the same time she had. Wilhelm, having seen us, thought we were a family and because of that wouldn’t go looking for Sam, as he’d once vowed—to her and to me—that he would. If I pretended to Sam that I hadn’t yet had time to read Izzy’s journal, if I could spin it out for even a week or two, it would soon be more than six months since the Armistice. There was chaos, violence, and talk of revolution in Germany. Once the peace conference ended, Wilhelm would go back to Berlin and our lives would diverge forever. If I did absolutely nothing, nothing at all, the attractions of life with me would continue to grow even as Wilhelm’s prospects receded still further. Will loved me. I was engaged in work of historical importance, and Sam knew that. I was to be knighted; Sam could become Lady Montgomery if she wished. Life with me was a much better life than no life and was I so bad to do what I had done? Wilhelm was the enemy, and the enemy had killed my sister, killed Faye’s fiancé, and, in a sense, killed Lottie’s Reg.

  All that happened a week ago. That morning I got out of the bath, put on my bathrobe, sat down, and began writing this story.

  It is for you, Will, and now I address you directly for the first time. It is for you, though I do not doubt that your mother, Sam— Sally Ann Margaret—will read it first. She, after all, is the one who, following one of our visits to the Wigmore Hall, told me to write down my memories, for you to read one day.

  I didn’t go back to the peace conference. I wrote to Malahyde to say that I wasn’t well, and since then I have stayed in my hotel room to set down this account. Now that I am reaching the end, I want to say three things more.

  First, I want you, Will, and your mother to have the house in Edgewater, plus anything else that my father leaves me when he dies. I shall write separately to my father but I ask, second, that you show him this account. I don’t want to be excused for what I have done, but I do wish to be understood. I am saddened that my mother will never read this. She always understood me instinctively—better than my father certainly—and, having had plenty of time to think it through, I grasp now that she fully appreciated the effect my wound might have on my life. She understood, as perhaps I did not, that few women could love a man—or wish to be a wife to a man—who could not have children.

  She was always secretly concerned that I would lead a solitary life. And I know now, from talking to one of her sisters who came to her and Izzy’s funeral, that the story she told me during the last conversation I had with her, on her favorite bench, about her not really loving my father when they met, was a total fabrication. She made up a story that she thought would warm and comfort me inside and set my mind at rest. Is that a mother’s love?

  Third, I ask that you do not try to find me, ever, not even if you have inherited your mother’s wanderlust. By the time Sam reads this, I shall be aboard a ship bound for somewhere a long way away—Australia maybe, Canada, Chile even. Who knows? I shall decide when I get to Le Havre and find out where the next ship is sailing for.

  Sam set me a task, to decide what to do, and this is my decision, my reply, to set you and your mother free—free financially, free emotionally, free of the past, free of me. Seeing you sitting on my shoulders, thinking you were my son, freed Wilhelm, he said, to move on. I can’t allow that. It would be a false freedom: you are his son, not mine.

  You will find the fact that I am not your father a terrible shock, a brutal blow. I am sorry for that, but it is why I have written this story. And you will, as time goes by and you grow older, learn that having a German father in England, or an English mother in Germany, is not easy. I hope that the arrangements I have made will help ease the pain that you, your mother, and your father will have to go through. Your mother realized, at the end, I think, that anti-German feeling in England would not end with the war. That explains a lot.

  Your mother… I have loved your mother, Will—oh! how I have loved her. Nothing will ever replace her in my heart. But I have loved you too. When I worried that you would die, at Battersea fair, on Chelsea Bridge, in the Lister Hospital, I thought I had discovered something worse than war itself. In your short life, my dear boy, you have had two sips of beer, and you gallantly pretended on each occasion that you liked them, for my sake. When you came into our bed, the morning after I had arrived home late, when I had been following Genevieve Afton, when you wanted to make sure I was still there, I felt the wriggle of your body, the clutch of your tiny fingers digging into the flesh of my shoulder, as you climbed over me, your small wet lips kissing my ear, and I suffered a bolt of electricity, a shock so vivid, so intense, so wonderful, that I realized I had only been half alive until then.

  Who would have thought that a war, of all things, could bring me such a gift?

  So, more than the fact that I have loved you, Will—dear Will— you have loved me. You are perhaps the only person outside my family who I can be sure has loved me. One day you will know what that means, but you will also learn that the love of a child is not the same as the love of an adult, of a man for a woman, or a woman for a man.

  When your mother first told me, on the cricket field in Middle Hill, when you were crawling all over the blanket, that she didn’t love me—well, I decided I could cope with that, that her kiss on our previous meeting held out a promise, and that I had a whole war to change her mind. When I saw how much she missed me, the night I stayed out late unexpectedly, shadowing Genevieve Afton, I told myself that our relationship was deepening. When we were by that lock on the canal, watching a filthy barge rise from one level to another and Sam said our horizon was expanding in a similar way, I believed her. When, by another canal, this time in Middle Hill, she said that her love for me was unfolding like a flower in spring—again I believed her. I thought it was a wonderful thing to say. When we made love the night before I left for Switzerland, and she cried out again and again, I thought we had reached the limits of intimacy, an intimacy neither of us had achieved before. When she wrote to me in Switzerland to say she was sleeping on my side of the bed, I thought that was a spontaneous gesture that confirmed our intimacy. When she suggested we take a bath together, on the evening of my birthday party, when you and I had been playing with the shoe polish, she convinced me that, yes, she would one day be able to love me. When she cried out, at the Lister Hospital, and said without thinking that I was your father, I was touched and, yes, I thought a line had been crossed. When she fought with Ruth, after Ruth and Greville had allowed me to take the blame in Lottie’s eyes for Reg’s betrayal, your mother was—was she not?—putting “our” family, as she described it, before her own. When she lectured me about “blood” not being everything it is cracked up to be, I saw no reason to disbelieve her. When she stood on the rung of the kissing gate, in the field where we scattered Izzy’s ashes, and told me she would marry me, I believed her, and all my anger dissolved in an instant. I am sure she meant it, and all the other comforting things she said, when she said them.

  I am sure she tried to love me. I was as much a gift to her as she was to me.

  But… I cannot shake my recollection of how uncomfortable she felt when Ruth showed her the children’s uniforms her factory had made, or when you saluted the grenadiers at Miss Allardyce’s on the day of the party. Why had she registered your name at Miss Allardyce’s under “Ross” and not used mine?

  Our predicaments suited us, both of us. But with me the way I am, there was never any chance of another child—a brother or sister for you—and the complications that might bring.

  Did your mother love me, Will, or—I repeat how hard it is to write all this—or was I… ? No. You will understand what I can’t bring myself to say.

  I recall with vivid but sad pleasure the walk in the back streets of Stratford, that Saturday in July 1915, when I fell in love with your mother right there and then, among the saddleries, foundries, and blacksmiths. I, more than anyone, should know that the internal explosion, the furnace of fire when love swells
to fill every organ and every cell of your being, when the juices of your system are warmed by this sudden charging and changing of your physiology, a transfusion that floods your arteries and veins with electricity, is very different from the slow glow that Sam says grew inside her, in regard to me. An adagio is not the real thing.

  Until last week, I thought I had been clever and had fooled everyone—Sam most of all—with the way I had contrived to meet her, and then build a life, a family, a love, all derived from a daring calculation, a neat juggling of our joint predicaments, the fortuitous way we had both been trapped by dramatic events and ironic circumstances. But the only one I was fooling was myself.

  The peace conference will last a few more weeks, so when she reads this your mother will know where to find Wilhelm. The idea that Wilhelm’s child, the enemy’s offspring, but the enemy who wasn’t the enemy, should be the one person whose love I could know, is strange, is ironic in itself, but the world is as it is.

  And, in making you free, Will, and in making Sam free, I hope that I am making myself free. I can see that now. Your mother could not have known, when she sent me Izzy’s journal, but the great events that put this whole story in motion have also helped bring about its resolution. At least I hope so.

  It is getting late and it is still raining outside. In a few hours I leave for Le Havre.

  Unlike Izzy’s splendid journal, my story is not for publication. If Sam reads it, if my father reads it, even if Wilhelm reads it, that is as it should be. But first and foremost it is a gift for you, my dearest boy, because in war and in peace I have been happy, joyous, and, yes, privileged to have been, for however short a time,

  Your father

  FROM THE LONDON TIMES, 12 MARCH, 1926:

  BRITISH VICTIMS IN BERLIN CLUB FIRE

  BERLIN—Police here yesterday named more of the victims in last Saturday’s arson attack on the Pelikan Cabaret Club in Schillerstrasse in the Wedding District of Berlin. No charges have yet been brought, though the attack is believed to have been orchestrated by the National Socialist Party and was targeted at the work of the Swiss-Austrian Jewish Expressionist artist Liesl Seide.

  Apart from Miss Seide, whose body was identified on Sunday, the 17 victims are now known to have included three British nationals: Piers Pargeter, the saxophonist with a New Orleans jazz band on tour in Germany; Rebecca Berwick, second daughter of the Earl of Berwick and Alnwick; and Colonel Henry (“Hal”) Montgomery. Montgomery, aged 34, was born in Edgewater, Gloucestershire. After being injured at the Front in the Great War, Colonel Montgomery had a distinguished career in military and political intelligence, and formed part of the British delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. He was the author of a popular study on the “moral costs” of the war, which became a best seller in 1919. In Berlin he worked as a publisher of artistic prints, Liesl Seide being one of his most popular artists. He never married.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mackenzie Ford is the nom de plume of a well-known and respected writer of history whose books are published in seventeen languages. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the London Times, the Observer, the Spectator, and the Sunday Times. He was for ten years a research associate at the Macdonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, during which time he wrote a book that was voted by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of 2006.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Mackenzie Ford

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.nanatalese.com

  Originally published in Great Britain as The Kissing Gates by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, London, in 2008.

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ford, Mackenzie.

  Gifts of war : a novel / Mackenzie Ford. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6106.O73G54 2009

  823′.92—dc22

  2008037259

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53050-7

  v3.0