The Novel in the Viola

by Natasha Solomons

  The death of Kit was the death of Tyneford, even if I did not know it then. From that day the dust would never quite be swept away. The browning petals that fell from the vase of garden roses always remained on the table in the hall; even Mrs Ellsworth did not care to tidy them. Mr Wrexham stopped fretting that the war prevented him from ordering wine to lay down in the cellar. There was enough for twenty years and after then – what did it matter? The church bells could not toll to mark the death of the son and heir and future squire, but we heard it just the same. We thought back of the great mackerel catch in the bay – would it have been a day of such happiness and abandon if we had known that it was our last?

  Mr Rivers broke the silence. ‘I read that they are interning German and Austrian women. I have done my best to keep you safe, but I want you to change your name. To something English.’

  I looked at him. His face was pale and his blue eyes appeared black in the darkness. His shirt was crumpled and the top buttons undone. Despite Wrexham’s morning ministrations, a dark shadow lined his jaw and above his lip a muscle ticked, making him seem wolfish in the gloom. On his breath I smelt the stench of cigars and whisky.

  ‘I like my name.’

  It linked me back to Anna and Julian. My father had cried when my sister changed her name on her wedding day. He claimed it was too much champagne and happiness but I knew better.

  Mr Rivers grimaced. ‘I did not ask if you liked your name. I asked if you would change it.’

  He hissed the words at me, eyes glinting. He seized my wrist and tried to pull me closer, but half-frightened of him I wrenched free and backed away along the wall. He closed his eyes, trying to gather himself, but his voice was firm and low. ‘Change your damned name.’

  I felt the emptiness grow inside me, gobble up all my flesh and blood into nothingness. I imagined myself to be perfectly hollow. I would never be Mrs Kit Rivers. What did my name matter anymore? I hadn’t noticed Mr Rivers slip inside, but now he reappeared clutching the whisky decanter and a pair of glasses. He set them on the table and motioned me to sit. He sloshed liquid into each glass, slid one across to me, and raised his own.

  ‘To him,’ he said.

  ‘To him,’ I replied.

  We drank, and I felt whisky burn my throat and tears sting my eyes. I blinked them back.

  ‘There has been a Rivers in Tyneford House since 1610,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘But all things come to an end. Kit has no cousins. The entail will simply die out with me. The world is changing and this is the way of things.’

  His voice was calm but his hand shook like a branch in the wind. He had almost finished his second tumbler of whisky and I realised that he was well on the way to being very drunk.

  ‘Well?’ he said, turning to face me, eyes bright with alcohol. ‘What shall we call you?’

  I shrugged. ‘My middle name is Rosa.’

  ‘No,’ he banged his fist down on the table. ‘Something English. So they won’t take you away.’

  He drained his tumbler and poured himself another.

  ‘Drink,’ he commanded, pointing to my half-full glass. ‘Elsie. That’s quite like Elise, but a good old-fashioned English name.’

  I winced and shook my head. ‘Absolutely not. My sister called me that and I hated it.’

  He laughed, a low unfamiliar sound. ‘Then how about something after your parents? Anna is nice and English. Or, if you want to be named for your father, Julia is pretty.’

  ‘No. We only name children after the dead. It carries their memory forward. To name a child after someone living brings bad luck, even death.’

  Mr Rivers fell silent and I realised with a pang of guilt that he was thinking he had given his own name to his son.

  I glanced around the garden. It was shrouded by night-time shadows, a breeze rustled through the fig tree overhanging the terrace and I imagined that I heard a low thrum from the soil, earthworms churning beneath the surface. Stray stars poked through the mantle of cloud and I could distinguish the pale tufts of sheep scattered about the hillside. I licked my lips and they tasted of salt. Nothing had changed and everything had changed. At once, I knew my name.

  ‘Alice,’ I said firmly.

  I was Alice through the Looking Glass; I had fallen into a topsy-turvy world, where everything looked the same but was the other way round. I longed to wade out into the breakers on the shore, where the pounding of the waves overwhelmed the noise in my mind. I felt sick standing still. It was as though the quiet meadows and stone ground shook and tossed like the green sea.

  ‘Alice. Alice Land,’ repeated Mr Rivers, testing out my new name like an unfamiliar dish. ‘Yes, all right. It sounds well enough. Expect it’ll take a bit of getting used to.’

  I closed my eyes and wondered if he could see the piece of me break away. I felt myself cleave in two: Alice and Elise. I smiled; it was a little death. Part of me had died with Kit, the part of me that dreamt of marriage to her sweetheart and picnics on the lawn, and a wedding with Anna in her black silk and Julian in his dinner jacket, and me taking the novel out of the viola and lying in a hammock with Kit by Durdle Door, and allowing him to peel off my stockings one by one and run his fingers along my smooth, plump thighs, and drifting on a boat with him at dusk – both of us naked and me trailing a lazy toe in the water and letting him kiss my belly and throat and breasts and the pleasure of languid summer days. It was easier if I was no longer Elise. Another girl, one whom I used to be, had dreamt of those things. Now, my name is Alice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Run, rabbit, run

  The August sun raged and the rugged Dorset cattle huddled beneath the spreading trees, seeking shade. The sheep fared better, shorn by the travelling gangs of shearers and left comically bald, soft sprouts of new wool appearing patchily across their backs. The hedgerows wore the thick gloss of high summer, the brambles studded with white flowers and tight, green berries. The countryside carried on just the same without Kit. Nothing in nature cared for him: not the larks laughing as they alighted in clouds from the mulberry bushes, nor the fork-tongued adder basking open-eyed on the sandy heath. And yet, despite nature’s indifference, both Mr Rivers and I sought our solace out of doors.

  My skin ripened, and I was as lean and strong as one of the roe deer galloping across the hilltop. My parents would not recognise me with my new name and close-cropped hair as I criss-crossed the meadows, watching the sheep. I had taken over from the shepherd’s boy, the latest to receive his commission. The shepherd, Eddie Stickland, was as old and weathered as the salt-lashed hazels on the cliff, and as he climbed the sloped meadows the wind blew him sideways like a leaf curl.

  Tending the flock it was as if nothing had changed: the seasonal rhythms were as steady as the grinding of the sheep as they chewed the tough hill grass. But that August in 1940, the war came to Tyneford. We no longer sat at the edge of the conflict, concerned about distant battlefields in foreign lands. I spent several evenings sitting on the steps of the shepherd’s hut watching the planes. The hut was a small painted caravan perched on the top of the hill like a bowler hat. The only light was a torch with the regulation layers of paper stuck over the lamp, but aware of the severe shortage of batteries, I was loath to even turn it on. I heard the growl of aeroplanes flying low across the channel. I hadn’t learnt yet to distinguish whether they belonged to ‘us’ or ‘them’ or both. A fine haze covered the sea, so that the noise of explosions and the rat-a-tat of gunfire was strangely bodiless, an invisible battle behind the mist. I expected that nearby Portland must be getting hit, or else a small war seethed out at sea. The sheep grazed, nonchalant and oblivious. They hid during a thunderstorm and yet this, being somehow outside nature, remained beyond their reckoning. As the sun vanished beneath the horizon, stars began to emerge one by one, as though a celestial Mrs Ellsworth was busy with her taper and candles. The hillside was quiet, filled only with the huffing of the sheep and the far-off rustle and snuffle of a badger or hedgehog, while out at
sea came the steady patter of guns and the whine and bang of shells. I sat in the growing darkness and listened.

  I heard gunshots. Not the pounding of distant artillery but a gun being fired close by. Had a fifth columnist broken cover or the Home Guard cornered a spy? Curiosity overcame fear and I hurried along the spine of the hill to the steep path leading down the cliff and emerged onto the beach. The night was cool and the beach so still that at first I thought it deserted. Perhaps I had been mistaken, and the sound had been a trick of the tide, or a farmer scaring a fox from his chickens. I padded along the rocks trying to get the panorama of the bay. Then I saw him. On the edge of the surf stood a man holding a revolver. As I watched, he cocked it and fired it into the waves.

  ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you all,’ he shouted, aiming the gun again at some invisible enemy.

  I recognised the voice. It was Mr Rivers. I scanned the water again, but there was nothing there – neither man nor boat. He raised the gun and squeezed the trigger but the chamber was empty. He felt in his pocket for more bullets and I sprinted to him, trying to grab his arm before he had time to reload. He spun round, raising the gun again. On seeing it was me, he lowered it. ‘Alice,’ he said. ‘They’re coming. I heard them coming and I won’t let them have him.’ Then growing angry, he turned on me. ‘I could have hurt you, stupid girl.’

  He staggered and aimed the empty revolver again at the sea. I tugged on his arm and he shook me off, casting me into the water. He fumbled with a bullet and, terrified he would injure himself or me, I shoved him as hard as I could. We both fell into the surf. He remained sprawled in the water, making no attempt to get up. I sat beside him and smelt the alcohol on his breath. He did not resist as I prised the revolver from his grasp.

  ‘I am a little drunk, Alice,’ he said, lying back in the shallows, letting the waves lap around him, soaking the fine wool of his suit.

  ‘Very drunk,’ I corrected, remaining beside him. ‘And where did you get the gun?’

  ‘It’s mine. I’m leader of the auxiliaries in these parts. I’m to head the resistance and keep out the invaders. Very hush-hush.’

  ‘You weren’t being terribly hush-hush just then.’

  ‘No. I suppose not. Pity. You didn’t suspect a thing till now. Went training for a week in Wiltshire and told you and Kit that I was going to London.’

  I looked at him in surprise. ‘You weren’t really in town?’

  He shook his head. ‘Neither of you even asked why I was going. You were both so pleased to have me gone and be alone.’ He smiled. ‘It’s all right. Don’t look so guilty. I remember what it was like to be twenty-one and in love.’

  ‘What were you shooting at just now?’ I asked, changing the topic.

  ‘I don’t remember. I heard planes. I thought . . . I don’t know.’

  On the horizon a ship blazed and grey flakes of ash wafted ashore and landed on our skin like a dirty snow shower. I did not offer him any empty words of comfort, just sat with him and watched the ship glow.

  ‘Did shooting at the sea make you feel any better?’

  ‘No. My family is still dead.’

  He stated this as a mere fact without any hint of self-pity. It was odd but I’d never really thought about Mrs Rivers as being Mr Rivers’ wife, I’d always thought of her as Kit’s mother.

  ‘Do you miss your wife as well as Kit?’

  Mr Rivers sat up, the water licking around his feet. ‘No. It’s so long ago. It was a sad and awful thing. But not like this.’

  I watched the burning ship and wished the flames could burn inside me too, cauterise the wound. I was as lonely as I had been during my first days at Tyneford. No. I stopped myself. This was a lie. I missed my family, hating the silence that war had brought, and I wanted Kit so badly that my ribs hurt. In the stories I told to myself, I was always the heroine, the dying soprano with the waspish waist, adored and mourned by her desolate admirers – but fate had left me alive and in excellent health. It was the hero who had gone. And yet, I shared my loneliness. I knew that Mr Rivers’ pain must be worse than mine. No father should bury his son; human hearts were not made for such grief. I had Mr Rivers’ friendship, and if I loved Kit I must help soothe his father, make his pain a thing he could bear.

  I made small changes to the running of the house. It would never be the same and it was useless to pretend otherwise. I did not want Kit’s room to become some sort of ghastly mausoleum. In Vienna, when the great-aunts lost their mother they preserved her things in tissue paper, not even taking the hair out of her comb, or emptying the tea from her cup. They never used the room, even though she’d been dead ten years before I was born, and the aunts – slotted beside one another on the sofa like books on a narrow shelf – could certainly have done with the space. Margot and I were afraid to go into our great-great grandmother’s room, terrified that her ghost lay inside, perfectly preserved within a rustle of tissue paper. I would not let this happen to Kit. Children would not be scared of visiting his room, as though he were some brittle, yellow-toothed phantom. Mrs Ellsworth bristled at what she perceived to be my lack of sentimentality.

  ‘Barely cold in his grave and you’re turning out his things. What would he think, miss?’

  I gave her what I hoped was a hard stare.

  ‘Mrs Ellsworth, Kit doesn’t have a grave. And since he’s dead, he doesn’t think at all. He certainly doesn’t need three very handsome, navy blue Guernsey sweaters. Burt, on the other hand, I’m sure could find use for them.’

  Mrs Ellsworth bustled out, grumbling about ‘the heartless girl’. Whose ‘Hunnish tendencies’ were only buried after all.

  I sat down on Kit’s bed. The room contained the scent of his ever-present cigarettes, that unique Turkish blend. He’d left his silver cigarette case and I helped myself. A box of matches lay beside the framed photograph of his mother and one of Kit, taken on the morning of his twenty-first birthday. Kit and his mother had died at almost the same age, and in the photographs side-by-side on the dresser they appeared more like brother and sister. At least I remembered Kit. He had not disappeared so absolutely from the world as Mrs Rivers. I lit my cigarette and inhaled the scent of Kit. If we ever had visitors, I would direct Mrs Ellsworth to make up this room. It must be done – we could not shut him away in a closed-off room.

  I made my way downstairs. During the last few months I had remembered how to dawdle. The hectic dash of the housemaid was in my past, and I knew from Diana and Juno that the English upper classes believed an idle saunter to be an important distinction of rank. Only the middle classes risked a jog. I couldn’t care less about rank, but I found it hard to hurry. My limbs were weary and cumbersome, and I was always tired. The only time I had energy was when I was striding across the hills and fields and through the damp summer woods.

  Mr Rivers was in the morning room, drinking a cup of coffee. He did not sit, but lingered beside the long windows, gazing across the lawn at the downy clouds drifting along Tyneford Barrow. Usually he took his breakfast early, sometimes so early that I wondered if he’d been to bed at all.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Rivers.’

  He turned towards me but avoided meeting my eye. ‘I am sorry about last night. I would be grateful if—’

  ‘I shan’t say a word – you must know that.’

  He nodded and then said briskly to change the subject, ‘We’re haymaking again today.’

  All week from my perch upon Tyneford cap, I watched him driving the farm horses across the fields below, his shoulder bent against the beast’s neck, cajoling, shouting, or else standing behind the vast rolling rake that gathered up the grass in wide green stripes. Now, in the elegant morning room with its cheerful yellow paper and breakfast china, he lurked in his work clothes; his Savile Row suit replaced by coarse trousers, hobnail boots and a plain white shirt. The sunlight caught his face, and I saw a growth of dark stubble upon his jaw. I wondered why Mr Wrexham had not shaved him. The butler-valet certainly would have baulked at
laying out such an ordinary wardrobe for his master.

  ‘I must go,’ said Mr Rivers.

  He placed his cup on the table, and left the morning room. I knew he avoided the house at mealtimes. Neither of us could help staring at the empty chair. He now took his lunch out in the fields, bread and cheese and a flask of beer, as though he really were one of the common labourers on the estate. The farmers avoided eating with him – he was the squire after all – and I knew he did not correct them, as he desired no company. Most evenings he stayed out so late that I had already dined before he returned. I knew it was because he couldn’t bear the formality of the dining room. It belonged to another time. I resolved on speaking to Mrs Ellsworth.

  ‘I have never heard of such a thing, not in my forty years of service,’ she said, clattering the wooden rolling-pin down on the kitchen table and flipping over her pastry. Little flurries of flour billowed across the surface, forming drifts beside the butter dish.

  ‘But Mrs Ellsworth, his son is dead,’ said Mr Wrexham in a quiet voice. He pulled out a chair and sat beside the whistling range. ‘Our duty is to serve their comfort. The practices and customs of our profession are to attend the comfort of the household. If, as Miss Land says, the needs of the master are best fulfilled by serving him dinner in the kitchen, then it must be done.’

  I looked at him with gratitude. ‘Thank you, Wrexham.’

  ‘My pleasure, miss. I take it that you would prefer to inform Mr Rivers of this alteration in present arrangements?’

  ‘Yes. And,’ I hesitated, ‘I shall tell him that it is at Mrs Ellsworth’s request. I shall explain that now with so few servants, it will make things very much easier.’

  ‘Very good, miss,’ replied Mr Wrexham with a slight nod.

  Mrs Ellsworth coughed in annoyance. The butler stiffened and his eyes narrowed. ‘My dear Mrs Ellsworth, in this one instance it is required that you feign an incapacity that we all know is, in truth, a gross misrepresentation of your remarkable capabilities. But this is what must be done to serve the master of this house.’