The Kissing Garden

by Charlotte Bingham

  George frowned.

  ‘This type of hedging normally takes centuries to grow.’

  Not quite believing what he was seeing, George followed Amelia into the garden, where once again the place where they had first made love was to astonish them. For in contrast to the hedging the inside of the garden was as neat as anyone could wish.

  ‘We haven’t dreamed this too, have we?’ Amelia turned to George. ‘Or did we dream it all?’

  ‘No, Amelia,’ George shook his head and put his arm round her shoulders, ‘we did not dream it and we are not dreaming now.’

  ‘What can possibly explain all this?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have absolutely no idea at all, but I do know one thing. I don’t think we should mention this to anyone. They won’t think we’re just fey, they’ll think we’re mad!’

  There was one bit of news which they did make public some three months later. The day after Mr Stanley and his team had finished rebuilding the entire outside wall of the main part of The Priory, as well as nailing down the last of the restored roof tiles, to her own and to George’s subsequent delight Amelia learned that she was expecting a baby.

  Twelve

  Feeling immensely protective of her in her new condition, George allowed Amelia to do only the lightest of work in the grounds while he helped on site with the continuing building work, which, due to a fine dry spring and Mr Stanley’s unceasing labour, continued without hitch. For herself Amelia was perfectly content, spending her days exploring their land and her evenings sketching out suggestions for how the finished estate might look.

  ‘Now, names? We must discuss names,’ George said one evening as they were sitting by the fire.

  ‘Yes, Captain Dashwood,’ Amelia said, accompanied by the small salute she always gave him when he used what she called his military voice. ‘Colonel if it’s a boy, Miss Colonel if it’s a girl.’

  ‘You are a tease,’ George groaned. ‘And that wasn’t my military voice. If I used my military voice you would have to stand down the fields to get away from it.’

  ‘Oh yes it was, Captain Dashwood. Even the baby jumped to attention,’ Amelia replied, patting her stomach. ‘But before we get on to the business of names, don’t you think perhaps we should first discuss the matter of your own particular future? After all, the six months you agreed with your father were up some time ago. I know it’s not something you want to talk about, but—’

  ‘It’s all right. Ever since you told me you were expecting, I’ve been thinking about it almost incessantly. I just didn’t want to talk about it until I was absolutely sure.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And now I’m sure. In fact I was quite sure before, or at least I thought I was, but now we’re going to have a child nothing would induce me to leave you.’

  ‘Are you sure, George? Are you absolutely sure this is what you want? At this particular moment in time it may seem to be exactly what you want, but what about in three or four years’ time?’

  ‘No, I know now that I could never go back to the army. It isn’t just you, or the fact that we’re going to be parents, or that we’re building a wonderful home – although these are all good reasons.’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame anyone for not wanting to leave The Priory, not once it’s finished.’

  ‘That would be reason enough for my change of heart. If nothing else, the thought of leaving you to go back into uniform fills me with dread, but it wouldn’t be sufficient reason to make me change my mind. If that’s what every soldier did, every soldier with a happy home, every soldier who loved his wife and family – well, we’d have been invaded again and again.’

  ‘Then is it because you don’t believe in war any more? I mean, have you become – a pacifist?’

  The very idea of a Dashwood being a pacifist seemed too extraordinary for words, even to the former Amelia Dennison.

  ‘No. No, I’m going to resign my commission not because of the war but because of the outcome. I think – I think it was wrong.’

  ‘You think fighting the war was wrong?’

  ‘No, I think the way we were made to fight the war was wrong. I think – I don’t know – but I think it might well have been in vain, I think we were betrayed. I think the generals and the politicians betrayed us soldiers, not once but a thousand times. It is the generals and the politicians who should have been shot at dawn, not the poor men who went mad with the strain of the mud and the mustard gas.’

  Amelia frowned at him, then stared into the fire for a long time.

  ‘But that means – that includes your father,’ she said finally. ‘If you’re saying the generals—’

  ‘That includes my father, yes, theoretically. I can see how it happens. I quite understand that when a war becomes as big as this war did, when all perspective is lost, the generals and the politicians lose sight of two things. They lose sight of what they were originally fighting for, and they lose sight of the fact that the people who are fighting for this long and now lost cause are not numbers, but men. Their fellow men. Men with mothers and fathers, sweethearts, wives and children. Every war turns men into cannon fodder, but this war – no.’ George stopped and shook his head. ‘This war turned the flower of this country to dust. And I think that was too high a price to pay for the final outcome: a botched treaty and a few miles of mud.’

  ‘Is that what you truly believe, George?’

  ‘I think so,’ George replied slowly. ‘But the point is, whether or not I am utterly convinced doesn’t really pertain. What matters is that if I have this sort of doubt then it simply is not fair to return to a profession where I am responsible for the lives of men. If there was another war – or, to put it another way, when there is another war, as there is bound to be just by the nature of things – it simply would not be right for someone who has doubts about its morality to be asking men to fight for their lives.’

  ‘I understand, George,’ Amelia said, stirring the embers of the dying fire with the poker. ‘I think that’s argued very fairly. But I don’t like one thing you said – when there is another war, you said. Not if. Is that what you really think? That after this war to end all wars there’ll still be another one?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Amelia,’ George replied, sitting back and drawing on the cigarette he had just lit. ‘In fact I’d say the next war will come about as a direct result of the one we’ve just fought.’

  ‘In that case I think we should leave names till another time,’ Amelia said, getting up and putting the guard on the fire, ‘and go to bed.’

  * * *

  ‘If you’re not going back into the army—’ Amelia began again as she lay in the dark of their bedroom.

  ‘Since I am not going back into the army.’

  ‘How will we live?’

  ‘I have enough put by for us to survive for the moment. Don’t worry.’

  ‘But if your father disinherits you – which he will.’

  ‘I’ll get a job. Don’t worry, I’ve given the matter a lot of thought. But I’m not going to teach, thank you. Those who can’t, et cetera. I’m not one of the can’ts. I’m a doer.’

  ‘So what will you do-er, George? Become an actor like Archie?’

  ‘I’m going to try writing,’ George smiled, turning on his side and putting an arm round Amelia and pulled her towards him. ‘That do you?’

  ‘For now,’ Amelia smiled at him in the dark. ‘Tell me the rest tomorrow.’

  ‘What I thought I’d try and write about is my life so far – but only in light of the war,’ George told her at breakfast the next morning. ‘How life was before the balloon went up, and how life is now.’

  ‘What makes you think you’d make a writer, George?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘I’ve never said anything to you about being a writer.’

  ‘You could inspire me to be anything.’

  ‘What about your father? You know how this will hurt him.’

  ‘I’m more concerned about my mother,
as it happens.’

  Amelia looked across the table at him in astonishment. ‘Your mother, George? Why?’

  ‘My mother comes from an even longer line of soldiers than my father. That was one of the main reasons they married. My father was deeply impressed by my mother’s distinguished military lineage and in fact it was my mother who first put the idea of being a soldier into my head. She’s the one who is not going to be able to forgive me for leaving the army. In which case it’s going to be completely impossible for my father to keep me in his favour, even if he wanted to.’

  Amelia put down her teacup.

  ‘You do surprise me. But then you don’t. The more I think about it, about your mother’s attitudes, the more sense it makes.’

  George picked up a piece of toast from the still warm pile in the white linen napkin beside his elbow.

  ‘I think we should all live our lives according to the way we feel we should. Not in the way we’re expected to. If my father wanted to kick over the traces and – I don’t know.’ George sighed in exasperation. ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Join Archie’s travelling players? That do for you?’

  ‘That will do just fine,’ George replied, returning the smile.

  ‘He’d probably be a star in no time. With those ultra-distinguished looks of his.’

  ‘No doubt. But the point is – if that was what he wanted to do, so he should and good luck to him. Just as I should be allowed to do what I feel I want to do. I’ve done my duty. I’ve served king and country, and now if I decide that is that, that should be that.’

  ‘Talk to him, George. Explain yourself to him the way you have to me and I bet he will understand your reasons.’

  ‘I think you’re right. Perhaps – better. I shall write the truth to him. That way we’ll soon see whether or not I have a literary power of persuasion.’

  For a whole week George did his best to write the letter. Each day on their return from the works at The Priory, while Amelia bathed and then cooked them dinner, George would sit at the desk under the window in the living room which overlooked the parkland and write page after page, all of which each evening were finally screwed up into little paper balls and consigned to the fire. Observing him, Amelia said nothing, sensing that George could well find the greatest difficulty expressing his thoughts, his feelings and above all his reasons for resigning his commission. But finally, unable to stand the slough of despair through which George was so obviously slogging, one evening when they sat together on the sofa after they had dined Amelia asked him whether or not she could be of any help at all.

  ‘Yes. You can sit and listen to me while I tell you just what happened. That way – once it’s out of my system – that way I might be able to put down something of it to my father. That way – he might understand!’

  ‘Very well.’ Amelia arranged herself on the sofa. ‘Whenever you’re ready, so am I.’

  Having poured himself a large whisky for courage, George sat down opposite her, his tumbler held in one hand on the arm of his chair.

  ‘You mustn’t be shocked,’ he began, after a minute’s thought. ‘You probably will be, and I don’t blame you. But what I do ask is that you hear me out without asking me anything.’

  ‘I promise,’ Amelia said, outwardly calm. ‘Whatever you say, I will not interrupt.’

  ‘It was the year before the end of the war, 1917, and we’d just made a successful push, successful that is if success is to be measured in terms of winning thirty feet of mud. Anyway, it was spring, middle of May actually, a perfect spring day as it happened with the air full of swallows and the ground covered with the dead. Having made the push it was now my job to find a new site for the guns, since our next intention was to attack this ridge about four hundred yards away, just beyond a village called Crozy which until this success had been in enemy hands.

  ‘I had a party of half a dozen men under me including a young lieutenant named Grace who had joined up the previous year, at the end of ’16. We chose a mounting for the guns in a copse about a hundred yards south of the village, and then as ordered we made our way to the village to rendezvous with a second unit sent ahead to mop up under the command of a Major Walker. I failed to locate Major Walker until I saw one of his men coming out of a barn ahead of us. The man was then sick on the side of the road, and subsequently I discovered him to be very drunk. That’s quite unusual, seeing we were still in action, so I went forward to investigate. As soon as I did, I became aware of someone screaming. Not that there was anything unusual about that since that’s what you hear all day most days when you’re under fire in the front line. But this was different because it came from the barn right ahead of me – and it was obviously a woman who was doing the screaming.’

  George paused for a drink of whisky, looking over the edge of his glass at Amelia as he drank.

  ‘Anyway. Anyway, I thought I had better see who exactly was doing the screaming and why, so with Lieutenant Grace and a couple of men I went up to the barn. I sometimes wish I hadn’t. First of all, just by the door were the bodies of four dead German soldiers lying face down to one side by a wall. They’d all of them apparently been killed by a shot to the back of the head. I questioned the drunk soldier as to how these men had been killed and he said he understood there had been a machine gun nest in the farmyard and that the enemy soldiers had been shot on the retreat. I deputized a soldier to go and search for such a nest while noting that none of the fallen Germans had any weapons. It emerged later on that there was no sign of any machine gun post in the vicinity.

  ‘Lieutenant Grace had gone in ahead of me and was shouting for me to come and see what was happening. I went inside immediately and saw a young woman surrounded by men . . .’

  George stopped and looked at Amelia, uncertain whether or not to continue, but as agreed Amelia remained silent.

  ‘She was surrounded by men in – well, let us say, no fit state. Lieutenant Grace, seeing what was about to happen, went to attack the major. Ridiculous as it sounds I then asked Major Walker what he thought he was doing – even though it was perfectly obvious. Pathetic the things you find yourself saying at times like that. Naturally he told me to forget it and get out and take my men with me, or he’d shoot the lot of us. I doubt if I’ll ever forget anything I saw during that damned war, but the look on that woman’s face has haunted me at every turn; and the fact that there was nothing Grace and I could do to save her!’

  George shook his head, and sighed a sigh so profound that by contrast the silence that followed, which Amelia at last broke, seemed quite light.

  ‘You mean there really wasn’t anything you or Grace could do? I mean, surely you have military police for that sort of thing?’

  ‘The reality of war is very different from the practices laid down in the drill books. All you can do is to follow the ground rules at times like this, or you run a very real danger of ending up at the wrong end of a court martial yourself. And the rule book says that when a senior officer issues an order to a subordinate, the subordinate must obey that order without question.’

  ‘But aren’t there any rules which generally govern how soldiers and armies are meant to behave in wartime?’

  ‘Not as yet, no. All that’s been established so far is the neutrality of medical facilities on the battlefield. No-one’s given it any proper thought at all as far as offences against civilians are concerned. Anyway, it’s pretty damn hard to take someone to court when you’re waist deep in mud and corpses. And then again, a lot of people see war as being very different from peacetime, and what in peacetime might be considered as serious misdemeanours more than often are seen as understandable reactions in war. Rather like boys letting off steam at the end of term.’

  ‘War is not quite what we are led to believe, then – no heroics, nothing like that, just -horror really. Oh dear, I don’t really want to hear this. I mean, the waste.’

  ‘Yes, really, just horror. As it happened Lieutenant Grace was a fluent French
speaker and he found out the girl had been just a simple peasant whom the Germans had found hiding in the woods. They brought her down to the village where they kept her captive in the barn for their personal pleasure, and when we recaptured the place Walker found four of the Germans still hiding out in the barn with the girl held prisoner. He shot the Germans and kept the girl, until we chanced upon him and caught him in flagrante. According to the locals Walker then murdered her and made it look like suicide to cover his tracks.’

  ‘And that was that?’

  ‘Yes and no. It became a bit academic because Walker was killed soon after. I had prepared a report because I was determined that he shouldn’t get away with it, but he was dead within a week of the incident – as indeed were most of the rest of his little band of villains. I doubt that my senior officers would have taken much note, however. Walker was considered a first-class officer himself, although most of us who served under him knew him as a thug and a bully, but good officers were always in short supply and never more so than at that point of the war. I’d probably have been told to do exactly what Walker told me to do.’

  ‘Forget all about it?’

  ‘I would imagine so.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before? I knew you were hiding something terrible from me.’

  ‘I didn’t know quite how to. I suppose guilt does that to you. And then somehow recently it didn’t seem to matter quite so much. Since we came here.’

  ‘Poor George.’

  ‘Not poor me at all,’ George replied, putting his arm round her shoulders. ‘More than anything I couldn’t stop thinking about that poor peasant girl. That was why – I don’t know whether you can understand this--’

  ‘Of course I can. Because of what you had witnessed first hand, you made some sort of association between that and us. You and I. When it came to making love--’

  ‘All I could ever see was her face. Not just in my dreams, which is where it started, but in actuality. Whenever – you know – even when I went to kiss you.’ George stopped and shook his head slowly. ‘I should have told you, I know. It was ridiculous not to, but I just couldn’t think how to – the words.’