The Kissing Garden

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Wonderful,’ Amelia said, carefully matter of fact. ‘I thoroughly recommend it.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Amelia feigned surprise, hoping to throw Hermione off the track.

  ‘Very well,’ Hermione groaned. ‘I can see I’m going to have to spell it out for you. What is It like?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I can’t! That’s why I’m asking you, you dope!’

  ‘Ravishing, Hermione. Just as you thought.’

  ‘I’m sure. But what exactly happens? I mean – exactly.’

  ‘What exactly happens,’ Amelia began hesitantly, trying to think of the best way to obfuscate the subject. ‘He takes you to bed—’

  ‘He kisses you first, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘And undresses you? Did he – the first time, I mean, that is – did he undress you? I have always imagined that to be the most thrilling bit. Just to lie there and have all your clothes slowly taken off. All your buttons and hooks undone by a man’s hand, then all your things very slowly slipped off, slipped off down your shoulders and your waist. . .’

  ‘That’s exactly what happens!’

  ‘Your clothes dropping to the floor, your naked shoulders—’

  ‘Hermione!’

  ‘What, for heaven’s sake? You’re a married woman, Amelia!’

  ‘And you’re not, Hermione. Besides. Someone might hear.’

  ‘Hardly. And you’ve spoiled it now,’ Hermione sighed. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Nearly naked with all your clothes dropping to the floor.’

  Hermione put her arm through Amelia’s and steered her round well out of sight behind some rose bushes.

  ‘Did you nearly swoon?’ she giggled. ‘When he did It?’

  ‘I don’t really remember much,’ Amelia lied, the fingers of her free hand tightly crossed out of sight. ‘It was so – so ravishing.’

  ‘Oh – wow. . .’ Hermione sighed. ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘You’re going to have to.’

  ‘Sometimes, when I think about it,’ Hermione replied, ‘I don’t think I will.’

  ‘Hermione! Now you really have shocked me.’

  ‘No – seriously, Amelia. Things aren’t quite the same as they were. Things are changing, and some quite nice girls are doing it.’

  ‘You’ve still shocked me none the less,’ Amelia said, mock starchily. ‘So in order that you don’t go getting any more loose ideas, you’re not to ask me anything more.’

  Even though her tongue was firmly in her cheek, Amelia kept up the tease – but not for the moral good of her friend. She changed the subject for her own sake, since she really did have no idea how to break the impasse that had arisen between George and herself. As her mother would say, Up a gum tree, darling!

  Concluding that it could perhaps be through some fault of her own, Amelia sought counsel. And when it came down to it she found her mother was, finally, the only person to whom she could turn, because both pride and honour and a great deal more ruled out everyone else.

  ‘I don’t see what exactly you’re trying to say, Amelia darling,’ Constance said after Amelia had euphemized herself into a corner. ‘Are you trying to say that George is proving to be an unsatisfactory husband? Because all I can say to that is early days, darling child. It is very early days.’

  ‘I’m not trying to say that, Mama, not exactly, no.’

  ‘What, then? Because all I can tell you is that it took an awful long time for your father and I to become – how shall I put it? Properly acquainted.’

  ‘Properly acquainted?’

  ‘To get to know each other as a man and woman should. You and George have only been married – what? A matter of two or three months or something--’

  ‘That isn’t the point, Mama.’

  ‘Then what is the point, darling? I can hardly tell you what I think if you won’t tell me the point of all this.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Amelia blurted out. ‘If you must know, George has hardly done more than kiss me!’

  ‘I see.’ Her mother sat thinking for a while. ‘These things take time, Amelia,’ she concluded. ‘I know that sounds like hogwash, as if I’m trying to fob you off with bromides, but things like this aren’t always as easy as the teacher makes them seem.’

  ‘If only I’d had a teacher,’ Amelia sighed.

  ‘I was speaking figuratively, ducky. What I mean is the theory might be all very well, but the practice is so often entirely different. Some men are very shy, you know. Women often find this hard to believe, particularly women with no previous – with little previous emotional experience – but believe me it is often the case. Your father was a complete and utter innocent. We both were. It was quite funny really, when you think about it now, but at the time I was utterly distraught. Like you, I even consulted my mother. And do you know what she said? She said, Wear a French scent and a black nightgown, and do you know what, darling, I did, and it worked a treat!’

  Confused and anxious as she was, Amelia could not help laughing at this, and of course it was comforting to know that her parents, however uninhibited and bohemic, had not just fallen into each other’s arms.

  Nevertheless, once she had parted from her mother, she realized that though it had been a great relief to laugh about it all it had not got her any nearer finding a solution to her marital problem. For what she had not been able to tell Constance was that she now suspected that the reason for George’s reticence had to do with some dreadful association that he could not help making whenever he was about to make love to her. And that if this was the case, their problem could well be incurable.

  ‘So what I must do is just be patient?’ she asked her mother, on yet another day, knowing that she had already decided that this was the only possible conclusion.

  ‘I know it’s hard, darling, but men, in my experience, do not like women to take the initiative, at least not in the bedroom.’

  ‘I see. Oh dear.’

  ‘Oh dear?’

  ‘Yes, oh dear. I mean, oh dear – why are men so complicated?’

  ‘You mean women aren’t?’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Just give it time,’ Constance advised, turning back to some pattern books for drawing room curtains. ‘For the moment, just pretend you are on holiday with a friend, and all will be well, you’ll see.’

  Amelia turned away. She would give it just a bit more time, but after that – she thought, in desperation, she might have to resort to wearing a black nightie and a heavier perfume.

  The period of grace finally granted to George by his father was also a matter of time. Realizing that George did in fact truly wish to resign his commission, but seeing how desperately torn he was between loyalty to his family and the promptings of his conscience, Amelia solicited the help of her own father, asking him privately to take the general on one of their famously long walks where he might persuade the old soldier at least to try to understand his son’s point of view. At first Clarence resisted, saying that he had no right to come between a man and his son, but Amelia persisted, agreeing in principle with her father while arguing that George was his own worst advocate and desperately needed someone to put his argument as objectively as possible.

  ‘But I don’t know his argument, Amelia,’ Clarence had protested. ‘I shall only go and say the wrong thing.’

  ‘Of course you know his argument, Papa,’ Amelia wheedled. ‘It’s the same as your own. The general listens to you. He thinks of George still as a boy who doesn’t know his own mind, despite the fact that he spent four years fighting in the front line.’

  ‘And won a VC.’

  ‘Exactly. If you could only negotiate a ceasefire as it were, just buy a little time for George to try and work things out completely, that would be something, at least.’

  That was exactly what Clarence did in fact manage finally to do, obtaining not as Amelia secretly hoped the unconditional peace for w
hich she had prayed, but a six-month respite during which George could have full leave of absence from his regiment and all his duties.

  ‘With the proviso, naturally, that you and I parley at the end of the said period,’ the general confirmed to George that evening. ‘Then we should know the lie of the land precisely. No-one will begrudge you your leave, not with your record, and we should not attempt to plead medical necessity as an amelioration. You fought the entire war, you were decorated for your actions, but there are plenty of others in the same boat, do you see? So we’re not looking for special treatment, just some extended leave. Battle fatigue – that’s all this is, and you’ll soon get over it. So take this young wife of yours off with you, rent a house somewhere, and in the due and proper course of time you’ll come back to your senses.’

  ‘You were just about to argue with him,’ Amelia said as they walked the dogs round the Dashwood estate that night. ‘I could see it. You were just about to say that the due process of time was neither here nor there and that your mind was made up, but thank God something stopped you.’

  ‘You stopped me. I could feel you stopping me. Even though I couldn’t see you where you were sitting, I could feel you. It was as if you were tugging my sleeve. The way you always have!’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘You’ve always been tugging on my sleeve, Amelia,’ George replied. ‘Even in battle.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sometimes it was just as if you were there hurrying after me. Once I swear you pulled me back, physically. It was one early morning when we were moving the guns up. We were cutting through what was left of this wood and there were two tracks, one going right and one left. I started to head the battery to the right and something – somebody – pulled me back. Do you remember once when we were on the beach, when we were little, and I nearly fell into the quicksand? I was challenging that friend of mine Robin to see who could jump the furthest?’

  ‘Robin Fairfield. Yes, I remember.’

  ‘You suddenly shouted, No! Not there, George! And pulled me back by my shirtsleeve--’

  ‘I remember you were rather cross, in fact,’ Amelia continued for him. ‘But then when one of you chucked a piece of driftwood ahead of you—’

  ‘Because you’d said it was unsafe—’

  ‘It was quicksand.’

  ‘That’s how it was in the woods. I heard your voice shouting No! So I called the men back and redirected them down the left hand fork instead. We hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when this damn great shell landed – a twenty pounder probably – and it exploded right where we would have been on the other track.’

  ‘I’m going to have a sit down.’

  ‘Why? What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘I just feel a bit giddy. I’m so sorry.’

  He sat her on a nearby stone seat by the lake. ‘You’re as white as a ghost.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me I’m mad, but still. I dreamed what you just told me.’

  ‘That’s just what they call – no, what do they call it? When you think you’ve seen something or done something before.’

  ‘No, George. It isn’t like that. It’s not déjà vu. I remember very well that I dreamed it. I dreamed it was night – and that there was a full moon. There was this little church. No. It was a ruined chapel.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘One of the men had a bandage over half of his head, and his arm was round another soldier’s shoulder--’

  ‘Bombardier Wiggins.’

  ‘And this shell was coming through the sky very slowly. As if it was floating. I threw myself at you – and you fell over – tumbled down a bank. All the time the shell was coming straight at me. I put my hands up and I caught it – and I held it in my hands while I shouted at you to turn back and take the other road – and you did. I saw you running off with your men down this long road – miles away, smiling and blowing me kisses. After which, once I knew you were safe, I put the shell down on the ground and lay on top of it, and woke up as it exploded!’

  ‘Good God, Amelia. You have stunned me.’

  ‘I even remember which day I dreamed it. Because when I woke up and went downstairs, still in my nightgown, my mother was decorating the Christmas tree which my father had cut down the night before. It was the day before Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Dear God in heaven . . .’

  ‘Now it’s your turn to look as though you’ve seen a ghost, George.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t I? That was the day it happened.’

  Of course when they returned to the house they could not wait to look it up in George’s journals, where to their mutual astonishment there was the incident of 23 December recorded in detail.

  ‘And you couldn’t possibly have dreamed it since?’ George said, staring down at his carefully noted log.

  ‘I’d have had to have dreamed my mother and the Christmas tree too. And if I’d dreamed it since we were married, I certainly would have told you.’

  ‘Yes – but you could have forgotten it until I prompted you.’

  ‘Or I really could have dreamed it on 23 December 1917. That’s the most distinct possibility.’

  ‘Of course. You’re absolutely right. Even though I don’t want to believe it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it doesn’t bear believing. It makes everything real unreal, and everything unreal – real.’

  George sat beside her on the window seat in their bedroom and put his arm round her shoulders while they both stared out at the distant landscape. From the shadows of the cedar tree an owl silently rose, silhouetting itself against the full moon, while far away in a distant place, a mighty weapon from a long forgotten terrible war lay deep under the dark waters of a hidden lake, a lake which lay directly beneath a single bright star which seemed to have no proper place in the constellation.

  Ten

  Amelia saw the star again in Somerset. The four of them, Clarence, Constance, George and herself, had taken a trip to the West Country to stay with Archie and Mae Hanley, theatrical friends of the Dennisons who lived just outside Glastonbury, where Clarence was due to give a reading from his recently published volume of war poems in the famous ruined abbey. Constance had suggested the trip partly because she knew how much Amelia enjoyed hearing her father read his works, but more because she was well aware how much the young Dashwoods needed to get away from the atmosphere at Dashwood House. So first thing on a bright, early September morning the four of them set off to travel down to Somerset in Clarence’s old Hillman, arriving at the Hanley household late in the afternoon having stopped for a leisurely lunch at an hotel in Hungerford.

  The Hanleys divided their time between London and Somerset, which was Archie’s home county, one of his most illustrious forebears having been a colonel in the army of King Charles I as well as one of the monarch’s closest friends, close enough in fact to be consigned to the Tower by Cromwell for defending the Crown. The family seat was a splendid Elizabethan house set in a hundred acres of parkland below the village of North Wootton, just above the Whitelake which rises outside Evercreech to flow into the sea at Highbridge. It was a most enchanting place and one which Amelia and her parents always loved to visit, redolent of the past, steeped in legend, and set in a beautiful rolling landscape dominated in the distance by Glastonbury Tor.

  ‘This place can hardly have changed since the time it was built,’ George remarked as he stood in the Great Hall, surrounded by the Hanleys’ pack of four dogs, all equally inquisitive. ‘I feel we should all be dressed as cavaliers.’

  ‘People frequently are, I assure you,’ Clarence assured him. ‘Archie and Mae delight in fancy dress parties.’

  ‘Oh, rightly so too, Clarrie,’ Constance called back to him, wandering about, lost in admiration. ‘This dear place cries out for costume.’

  Since there was no-one around to greet them, the party deposited their luggage in the Hall and went in search of their hosts, whom they found fast asleep in the r
ose garden, Mae lying in a hammock slung between two leafy trees and her husband stretched flat on the ground with arms and legs akimbo as if staked out. In fact so fast asleep was he that it took a combination of Clarence’s shoe and the smallest dog’s tongue to rouse him.

  ‘My friends!’ he exclaimed, rising with extraordinary grace from the grass. ‘My dear, dear friends! Mae, my angel? Our lovely people have finally arrived!’

  Soon they were all at tea, which the Hanleys’ portly housemaid set as instructed on the grass while the party arranged themselves on rugs shaded by a vast lopsided parasol. The talk was non-stop, particularly once Archie began making his speciality, a cocktail of cold champagne, brandy and peach juice. Bottles of wine hung to cool in a net suspended in the waters of the river by which they were sitting, and Archie and Mae regaled their guests with hilarious stories of their latest theatrical enterprise, a tour of the Scottish play – as they like all their fellow actors insisted on calling Macbeth, despite being outside a theatre – stories so scandalous and amusing that even the normally reticent George was soon laughing more than Amelia had seen him do for weeks.

  ‘Really what we are laughing at is Archie’s face more than anything,’ George remarked to Amelia later when they were getting ready for dinner. ‘It’s so enormous, and so sad, and so funny.’

  ‘I’d sometimes love to be an actor,’ Amelia sighed as George helped button her cream silk dress. ‘To travel round the country with just a suitcase – playing a different theatre every week – sometimes every night. Play-acting your life away, not having to worry about reality.’

  ‘If that’s what acting is, getting out of touch with reality,’ George said with a wistful smile at his young wife, ‘then I think I shall join up tomorrow.’

  But what was to happen to them on the morrow was already written in the stars, as so many things are, and will be.

  Amelia was sitting in the window seat of their bedroom when she saw the star again. Just as in Scotland by the shores of the loch, at first she once again imagined it to be the North Star, but then when she examined the skies more closely she realized that, just as in Scotland, it could not be, for the North Star was all too clear, or so it seemed to her.