The Novel in the Viola

by Natasha Solomons

  The range finally lit, I stood up and brushed myself off.

  ‘Don’t you look at me like that, miss,’ said the girl. ‘You know what it’s like. Why would anyone stay when they has got a choice?’

  Knowing the miserable drudgery of the scullery maid’s existence, I could not argue. ‘I hope you’ll be happy, May.’

  As I walked down the corridor, I listened to Mrs Ellsworth in the store rattling jars and muttering to herself about the dwindling stock of jam. The back door opened with a slam, and the daily bustled inside with a blast of cool air and rustling parcels.

  ‘Mornin’,’ she grunted, hurrying past me to start cleaning the house.

  She looked more harassed each day as she attempted to undertake the work of three maids and a footman. With a sigh, I wondered how we would manage without May. I had beseeched Mr Wrexham to put away the dinner silver and china, and to use the plain luncheon set for both meals to keep down the amount of polishing, but he would not hear of it. ‘The standard of a house is measured by its silver. What would the Ladies Hamilton think?’ I thought that living in the Dower House, with the army teeming through Lulcombe Park, that they might tolerate luncheon silver. I was not sure that I cared; I was more concerned that our last daily might give her notice, exhausted by endless work. I tried to help the servants by stealth; dusting the china when Mr Wrexham was busy in the cellar, rolling out Mrs Ellsworth’s pastry and setting it to blind in the oven, rubbing the beeswax onto the dining room table. Mr Wrexham was gratified by May and the daily housemaid’s surprising efficiency, while the maids believed that Mr Wrexham had undertaken the work himself. I knew that this system of haphazard subterfuge could not continue.

  The door to Mr Wrexham’s pantry was open, and I watched for a moment in silence as the old butler knelt by the grate, his elegant tailcoat covered by a white apron while he buffed his master’s shoes to a gleam. The room was devoid of decoration, save for a faded photograph in sepia tones of Mr Wrexham with a young Mr Rivers and his bride. There were no pictures of Mr Wrexham’s family. On the low table beside a lamp rested a calendar, each day tidily crossed out with blue ink as it passed. I glanced at the calendar. 6th of March.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  Mr Wrexham looked around, a frown sliding across his face for an instant, before his features smoothed over once more. I knew he viewed my presence in the servants’ halls as a violation of the green baize door.

  ‘You may ring the bell in your room, should you require anything, miss,’ he said, with mild reproach.

  I ignored the reproof and continued to stare at the calendar.

  ‘The date, Mr Wrexham. It’s my birthday. I’m twenty-one today.’

  ‘No argument, I’m taking you to lunch,’ said Mr Rivers, propelling me across the driveway and into the waiting motorcar.

  ‘But the petrol?’

  ‘We’ve been saving the ration for months. And this is an essential journey. I’m taking you out to celebrate your birthday.’

  He opened the door for me, and helped me inside.

  ‘All right,’ I said, sliding into the leather seat. ‘Thank you. But it’s really not necessary.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Good grief. I never realised how troublesome you can be.’

  I said nothing. I saw myself dancing with Kit, my hair slicked smooth as a boy’s. Kit dipping me, kissing me. I thought Mr Rivers knew exactly how troublesome I could be.

  Art drove us to Dorchester. Mr Rivers and I did not speak much during the journey. He appeared busy with his thoughts, and trying not to knock into me as Art swung the Wolseley around the tight, hedged corners (Art was much more at ease driving Mr Bobbin than the smart motorcar). I was transfixed by the rushing green of the fields, punctuated around Lulcombe by the sage of the crawling army trucks and khaki tents that had sprung up across the parkland like giant molehills. We became stuck in a traffic jam of great army lorries outside Dorchester. They crawled towards us like dragons, the brown hedges brushing them on both sides. There was something ominous in the tick and growl of their diesel engines, and Art had to steer the car almost into a ditch in order to pass. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled up outside the Royal Hotel and, grumbling, lumbered around to open my door. Mr Rivers offered me his arm. ‘Shall we?’ he asked with a smile.

  We drank champagne. An elderly waiter filled my glass and I looked at the bubbles rushing to the surface. Champagne always made me think of Anna. I was wearing the pearls she had smuggled into my luggage, and pretended that they were my birthday present. They felt tight around my throat.

  ‘Do you not like champagne?’ asked Mr Rivers, seeing I was not drinking. ‘I can order something else, if you prefer.’

  ‘Oh, no, thank you. It’s lovely.’

  I reached for the glass, and gulped down the liquid in a few swallows. There was a pleasant buzzing in my head. There was no linen on the table, only a waxed cloth that felt slightly sticky beneath my fingers. Mr Rivers ordered quail eggs and poached salmon and hot cucumbers and we ate a sort of trifle made with eggless custard for dessert. It tasted mainly of brandy and the buzzing in my ears built to a roar. The dining room was almost empty. A tired-looking man in army uniform lunched across from a woman with startling dyed-yellow hair, and in the far corner two old ladies in thick beige stockings sipped tea and gossiped beside the fireless grate. I couldn’t help but think of Café Sperl or the Demel and the mirrored coffee houses of Vienna, where the towers of pastries and chocolates were reflected into infinity and neat waitresses in black and white glided between the tables, pouring creamy hot chocolate from polished silver jugs.

  When we had finished eating, Mr Rivers ordered a cigar and a glass of port. Leaning back in his chair, he laughed softly.

  ‘This is rather awful, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Think we might have been better to have stayed at home, opened a bottle of the ’23 Latour and let Mrs E. cook.’

  I smiled. Mr Rivers did not know that it was usually me who now prepared his bourguignon or rhubarb sponge.

  ‘No. It’s lovely. Just the war’s all. Makes it difficult.’

  ‘Yes, well, if they’re going to stay open, might as well try to be a bit less grotty.’

  He took a puff on his cigar. ‘When Kit’s home, we’ll take a trip to London. I’ll take you both to the Savoy and we can celebrate properly.’

  At the mention of Kit we both fell silent, and at that moment I did not want to go back to the empty house. It was my birthday and I wanted to forget for an hour.

  ‘Mr Rivers. Let’s stay out a little longer, please.’

  He looked at me in surprise and then he seemed glad. ‘All right. Well. We could go to the pictures, I suppose.’

  The Dorchester Picture Palace was showing Rebecca. Mr Rivers purchased two tickets, right at the back, and we tiptoed in, the main feature having already started. The auditorium was thick with smoke, and I stared at the screen through a yellow fog. We elbowed our way to our seats, stumbling over the tangles of embracing sweethearts who grumbled at our interruption. The seats at the rear were cramped and, as the airman sleeping beside me half sprawled onto my lap, I was forced to edge closer to Mr Rivers. I watched, enthralled, as the young Mrs de Winter fluttered through the house. The screen filled with the writhing sea and a timber boat bounced like a toy on the waves, and I shuddered, relieved Kit was aboard a proper ship. I had not been to the cinema in England, and I loved the ribald atmosphere – the audience cajoled and cheered the actors as though it was a live stage play. I belonged among them – squire, former housemaid/refugee, army officers, shop girls and WAAFs – we were just an audience, united by the story on the big screen. I forgot the world beyond the picture and I was happy.

  We did not speak during the drive home. It began to rain and drops thrum-thrummed against the glass, while the motorcar roared through puddles, throwing up water as brown as milky tea. I must have fallen asleep, for the next moment we were drawing up outside the house. Mrs Ellsworth was waiting on the front steps.
She clasped an umbrella with both hands, but it threatened to take off like a frightened bird. Filled with instant dread, I was opening the car door before it had even stopped. I hurled myself out, oblivious to the cascading rain, tore across the drive and ran up the steps, two at a time.

  ‘It’s Kit—’ she started.

  ‘Oh God, oh God,’ I said.

  I looked past Mrs Ellsworth into the gloom of the hall. Kit sat in a rather splendid wheelchair, his leg out in front, sporting my hideous hand-stitched mauve bed-jacket. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Happy Birthday.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Witch-stones

  Kit was in plaster for six weeks. The cause of his injury was a source of considerable irritation to him. His ship had seen some brief skirmishes as part of an escort protecting merchant convoys in the North Atlantic from the wolf packs. Two officers had been injured and a midshipman killed by mines while running exercises, but Kit’s broken ankle was more ignominious, caused by slipping on an icy deck during night watch off the coast of Norway. The ship’s doctor set his leg, but on returning to Scapa Flow, Kit was transferred to land and sent home to recover. There was no room on the tightly packed corvette for an injured sailor.

  Considering that he was usually quite content to lounge upon the sofa smoking endless cigarettes and devouring the Racing Post, he was an awful patient, always fidgeting and complaining that he was bored. I noticed that he smoked even more, if it were possible, and that he looked older. He had filled out a little, and necessarily confined to lolling in an armchair he lost that restless quick movement which always made him seem so boyish. He was in some considerable pain, and I think the cigarettes and morning whisky were ways of distracting himself. We sat for hours in the warm fug of the drawing room, the fire stoked to a furnace by Mr Wrexham, despite our protestations. I read novels aloud to entertain him, always the latest lurid romance – the more absurd the language of love, the more he liked them. Whenever my voice grew hoarse and I paused he’d wave impatiently, cigarette between his fingers. ‘Well, go on.’

  I laughed at him. ‘You’re unbearable. You read it.’

  He shook his head and fixed me with a lazy smile. ‘No. I like to hear you. Especially the wicked parts. They make you blush, you know.’

  It was fortunate in some ways that Kit’s injury forced a certain distance between us. In his letters, he had confided desires and breathless acts of love. At first they were fervent, schoolboy imaginings, the language one might expect of a love-struck gentleman who had once attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, but then, after a month or more onboard his ship, they grew coarser and more thrilling. I knew I ought to be shocked, or angry and repulsed. I was not. I was intrigued and baffled by these new words that my faithful German/English dictionary could not explain. The mysterious words were as exotic as the half-understood acts that they failed to describe. I was forced to imagine the pictures which these guttural, consonant clicking sounds represented. Unconstrained by meaning, my imaginings were frantic. Kit’s descriptions of lovemaking might only have taken place in the pages of his letters, but I had read and re-read them, picturing them in the warm dark every night as I lay in bed, quite unable to sleep. We were both conscious of some shared intimacy, like adolescents the day after a kiss at a school dance, at once shy and eager.

  ‘Read some more,’ said Kit, stroking my cheek with his fingers.

  ‘Later. My voice is all hoarse.’

  ‘Your necklace,’ he said, noticing Anna’s pearls beneath the collar of my shirt.

  ‘Do you like them? They were my mother’s.’

  He reached a hand behind my neck and drew me close, kissing me. As he let go, he unfastened another button on my shirt and traced the pearls with a finger, brushing the bare skin at my throat.

  ‘They are very pretty.’

  I let him kiss me and toy with the pearls. I was pleased that his attention was wholly upon me. The minute he returned to Tyneford, I knew that for the first time I had a rival. One much fiercer than Diana or Juno; a rival I had to accept and learn to live with for the duration of the war. Kit loved me, but his loyalty was torn between the two of us: The Angelica and I. He was glad to be home and to sit and chatter beside the fire, but it wasn’t like before. A part of him yearned to be at sea. He hated being here while she was somewhere in the Atlantic, scouring the waters for U-boats and enemy destroyers. His shipmates risked their lives while he lazed on the sofa sipping cocoa and eating ginger biscuits.

  ‘Tell me what it’s like to be at sea,’ I said.

  Kit fell silent. He did not speak about life on the ship. He claimed his reticence was because of secrecy, but I suspected that it was simply easier. When onboard he needed to become another version of himself, Temporary Sublieutenant Rivers, and now at home he wanted to be Kit again. He did not wish to be one man, while speaking of the other. I did not push him, although later I wished I had.

  When we were not reading together in the drawing room, or taking meals in the morning room, Kit liked to sit outside. He wheeled himself onto the terrace, discarding the tartan blankets Mrs Ellsworth insisted on tucking about him and, armed instead with a hipflask of brandy, he sat for hours with the old nursery telescope trained on the sea. To the gardener’s dismay, he liked to propel himself across the lawn, the chair’s wheels leaving two neat trenches. He sat at the end of the garden, where the line of bright grass cut into the blue horizon, and scrutinised the sea for ships. Mr Wrexham sometimes joined him, and the two men sat together, one head white as a laundered handkerchief, the other gold as harvest, passing the telescope back and forth between them. The butler carried out a low table and placed the portable wireless set upon it. Kit listened to it almost constantly, craning forward in his chair whenever the naval news came over the airwaves, as though he could get closer to the action. Whenever there was something about a Flower class corvette, his fists would clench, and he’d hold his breath. There was no mention of The Angelica.

  The day Kit’s leg was taken out of plaster, Poppy returned home for a few days’ leave. She came straight to the house and joined us on the terrace where Kit was slowly limping up and down with the aid of a walking stick. It was near the end of April and a damp morning ripened into a warm afternoon, the bright lichen on the roof tiles yellow as sunshine. I paced beside Kit, hovering at his elbow, anxious as a mother house martin as her chick first takes to the skies. He swore in frustration.

  ‘Fuck.’ He banged his stick against the drainpipe. ‘I’m like an old fucking man.’

  I’d never heard him curse like this before, and halted for a second before helping him to sit on the wooden bench. Poppy leant against the wall, closing her eyes in the spring sun. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Swear like a sailor now, Kit? Bit of a cliché.’

  He smiled and pulled me onto his good knee, kissing my nose. ‘Sorry, darling. Just not used to being a blasted cripple.’

  ‘You’re not. You’ll be better before you know it,’ I said, forcing myself to smile, conscious that as soon as his leg healed, he’d depart for The Angelica.

  ‘How’s Will?’ asked Kit, changing the subject and looking at Poppy.

  ‘I don’t know. He sailed for France just before you came home. He was all right, last I heard. Wrote asking me for scraps of French and to check that someone’s looking after his plants and feeding that horrid cat. Don’t think they’re doing much. Training. Waiting for something to happen. Last I heard, only thing he’d shot was a rabbit.’

  ‘Nazi rabbit, I hope?’ said Kit.

  Poppy smiled. ‘No Nazis in sight. Not sure who all this waiting is worse for – us or them. And the post’s been a bit ropey last few weeks.’

  Her voice was playful, feigning unconcern, but I didn’t believe it.

  ‘I say, shall we call for some drinks? I know it’s only teatime but I fancy something stronger,’ she added, slumping into a chair.

  I disappeared to ask Mr Wrexham for some wine, and when I returned with a bottle, the two of them w
ere sitting in silence, huddled around the wireless.

  ‘Denmark’s surrendered,’ said Kit, fixing himself a drink. ‘God knows what’s happening in Norway. Half the navy’s probably up there.’

  ‘What does it mean for France?’ asked Poppy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kit, passing her a glass. ‘The Western Front is going to have to open up sometime. Our boys are ready for them.’

  This formed the pattern of the ensuing days. We lazed in the garden, warmed by gentle sunshine, listening to the wireless, often drinking rather too much wine, while the cuckoos called from Rookery Wood and the fishing-boats dawdled in the bay. I remember every day as a warm, unbroken blue. It had the feel of the last weeks of the summer holidays, when school looms and yet belongs so completely to another world that one can scarce believe the sun-filled days of freedom could ever end. Lying on a picnic rug, I tried to count the newly ripened freckles on Kit’s nose, and did not think it was possible to love him more than I did at that moment. I helped him with his exercises and his stride grew stronger as we spied our first spotted flycatcher alighting on the flowering plum. He discarded his stick the same day as a pair of holly blue butterflies flitted across a spray of irises. By the time the pale pink London pride bloomed in the rockery, he could walk smoothly with only slight pain. I tried not to wish Poppy away, but these were stolen days and I wanted Kit to myself.

  I assisted Mrs Ellsworth with the cooking. She refused to listen to the Home Service with its constant news bulletins, complaining that it was ‘stuffed to the gills gruesome’, preferring the endless tunes playing on the Forces radio. She loved the cheerful wartime songs, and the kitchen echoed to the strains of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, ‘I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen’ and ‘This is the Army, Mr Jones’. She’d hum along as she curried parsnips and bottled elderflower cordial, breaking off to complain, ‘Why can’t they come up with such good tunes in peacetime? I don’t know.’