The Last Summer

by Judith Kinghorn

  I took the book from him. “It’s meant to be. It’s impressionistic, Papa.”

  I looked back at the painted paper. I’d planned on sending it out to Tom, but now I wondered what he’d see. Would he recognize what I’d tried so hard to capture? Or would he, too, hold it upside down and see only a blurred mess of pale colors?

  “Perhaps you should work on it some more. Add a little more detail . . .” Papa suggested, smiling at me. And he was right. It needed more work.

  “Yes, I think you’re right . . . it’s much too pale. I need to add darkness . . . give it more depth,” I said, but he was distracted and had turned back to his map of Europe.

  He’d recently pinned the map on the wall above his desk and had it marked with pins and little bits of red and blue ribbon. I suppose he thought he was doing his bit: keeping track, following events. Around the house all anyone spoke of was the war, and now I too was keen to hear about it, to join in. When I left Papa in the library that day I went to the kitchen, where Mabel and Edna sat peeling vegetables at the long pine table. It seemed to me that between them they knew everything, every figure and statistic. And their conversation, so different to the other side of the green baize door, was an endless stream of fascinating detail.

  Edna had been with us for years, since before I was born, and Mabel, for at least five years. They were both unmarried and, along with the other female servants, had rooms on the east side of the house, above the kitchen and servants’ hall, looking out over the stable yard. They were both younger than they appeared, and I only knew this because Mama had told me. She’d mentioned that Mabel was, surprisingly, considerably younger than Edna. So, I’d estimated, Edna was probably nearer to thirty than forty, despite her matronly appearance, and Mabel—a good few years younger.

  I showed them both my painting, asked them what they thought.

  “Oh yes,” Edna said, squinting at it under the light. “It’s pretty . . . very pretty, miss. Is it the lake?”

  And I think I yelled, “Yes! It is, it’s the lake, and look, that’s the island . . . it’s not finished, of course, still needs more work.”

  “Very atmosphereful. Oh yes, you’re artistic, Miss Clarissa. Always have been. Hasn’t she, Mabel?”

  Mabel wiped her hands, took hold of the book and studied it for a moment. She was always more reticent than Edna, and compliments were not easy for her.

  “Yes . . .” she said, looking up at me with a tight smile. “Very good.”

  “Shall I . . . would you like me to paint something for you, Edna?” I asked, glancing over at her and smiling.

  Her face lit up. “Ooh, yes, I should say. Yes, I’d like that. I don’t have any paintings, you know? Not one.”

  “I’ll do it then,” I said. “I’ll paint something for you next. But it might be . . . it might be more abstract.”

  “Abstract? That sounds lovely, dear,” she said, as I took the book from Mabel and sat down at the table.

  And as I pondered on my next “commission,” they resumed their conversation: the one I’d interrupted when I’d walked into the kitchen.

  “And over twenty more gone last Friday—an’ most of ’em from Monkswood too,” Edna said, shaking her head. “How they’ll cope there now I don’t know . . .”

  Monkswood Hall, the estate bordering ours, had twice or even three times as much land, a folly, its own chapel, and at least two farms. It also had three times as many servants. The Hamiltons, who owned it, had made their fortune building ships, and were rumored to be descendants of Emma Hamilton. This rumor seemed to be confirmed by their choice of name for their eldest son, Horatio (known to everyone as Harry). And they were obviously fond of alliteration, for the four younger children’s names also began with H: Howard, Helena, Harriett and Hugo. We’d seen quite a bit of the Hamilton children growing up, and I’d attended the last hunt ball at Monkswood with my parents. Like my brothers, all three Hamilton boys had gone off to fight, and I was distracted for a moment by the mention of Monkswood, the memory of that ball, and my dance with Hugo Hamilton.

  “But how many have we lost?” Mabel asked. “Got to be pushing a dozen now, countin’ John and Frank, and them boys down at the farm. Mr. Broughton says at this rate there’ll just be him and his barra’ left.”

  “John and Frank . . . they’ve gone?” I repeated.

  “Been gone since a week past Friday, and Frank’s mother—beside herself,” Mabel replied, staring at me, wide eyed.

  “But . . . but Frank’s not old enough, surely. He’s only a few months older than me . . .”

  “That’s as may be, miss. But them young ’uns always finds a way.”

  I thought of Frank, immediately saw his sweet blushing face, and my heart sank. I hadn’t said good-bye to him, or to John. And now they’d gone. I looked to Edna, who smiled back at me. “Don’t you fret,” she said, “the Lord’ll keep the good ’uns safe.”

  “My cousin . . . she says we’ll all have to do our bit . . . all have to do more,” I offered.

  Mabel raised her eyebrows. “Is that right, miss? Well, there ain’t enough hours in the day to do what I have to do now—let alone more.”

  Edna shook her head again. “Things’ll change, that’s for sure.”

  “And when you think of poor Lottie Baverstock,” Mabel said, looking up from her work for a moment and out through the window. “Her only just married . . . and him over there now.”

  “Well, at least she saw some action!” Edna said, and they both laughed, then glanced at me and back at each other.

  Edna rose to her feet, the bowl of peeled potatoes tucked beneath her bosom. “We’ll have to settle for dancing with each other at the harvest festival dance, I reckon. What do you say, Mabel?” And she wiggled her broad hips as she moved through the scullery door.

  Mabel sighed. “And there was my Jack about to propose as well.”

  “You’re to be married?” I asked.

  She stared at me. “Well, yes, miss . . . eventually.”

  Growing up at Deyning, the kitchen had always been a place of extraordinary mystery to me, as well as mouthwatering delights. It was an intoxicating muddle of comforting shapes and smells, manpower and secrets, and I’d longed to taste more. For so many years I’d wanted to be part of that camaraderie, wanted to know where Mabel and Edna and all the others had come from, what their stories were. I wanted to understand their jokes and repartee. But by being there, within the warmth of the old range and their banter, I’d caught a glimpse of something: something quite different to the formality of my parents’ world. They laughed, and loudly, at things I knew they shouldn’t laugh at; they slapped each other’s backs and danced without music; and for a while, at least, they had allowed me to join in: to giggle and sing with them, to eat with my fingers and lick spoons. But latterly these interludes had ceased. And now, it seemed, I was no longer allowed that glimpse.

  During those first days and weeks of the war I suppose we were all stunned, all in shock. We’d had no time to think, no time to prepare, and almost immediately, even as we grappled with the very notion of war, the carnage had begun. Each day the ironed print of the newspaper delivered us straight to France, to strange-sounding, unknown villages; places we’d never heard of, and perhaps would never have known of, but places whose names we’d be unable to forget for the rest of our lives. By the start of September it was estimated that fifteen thousand British troops had already been killed. Fifteen thousand. Wiped out within a month of summer. And I thought once more of those men I’d heard singing on board the train; singing their way to death.

  . . . I cannot bear to leave this place, & the not knowing when or if we will return, whether it be months or years (as some now say) breaks my heart, & you know why . . . Today we had the Belgian soldiers (8 of them) here for tea at 3 & afterward took an excursion through the lanes in the Landau—for what I suspect will be the last time . . . I smiled the whole way, but inside I was screaming.

  The first time I h
eard them I thought it was thunder: a storm, sweeping in from the sea, over the hills. I lay in my bed listening to it, waiting for it to move in—or fade away. But it didn’t. It continued. A dull, distant rumbling, punctuated every so often by something louder, a boom. Those were the big guns, Papa told me.

  One particularly windy morning my father arrived back from the farm in a state of excitement. He came rushing into the morning room, where I was sitting quietly with Mama—reading the newspaper.

  “You should hear it out there,” he said, smoothing down his windswept hair. “From the bottom of long field woods you’d think the fighting was just beyond those hills. Remarkable,” he added, shaking his head. “Quite remarkable . . .”

  I raced outside and jumped into the dogcart to return there with him, but Mama refused to come. She had no desire, she said, to hear the distant barrage of warfare, particularly not one in which her sons were fighting. We sat in the dogcart on a track at the southernmost point of the estate; and we sat in silence for ten minutes or more, listening to the intermittent juddering and booms, swept across the Channel and into our fields.

  “It seems so near . . .”

  “It is near,” my father replied. “Only a narrow channel of water separates us from that fighting, Clarissa.”

  And as we turned and headed home it suddenly hit me: a narrow channel of water. If the enemy could push forward, break through our lines, reach the coast of France . . . they could cross that channel of water. I wanted to ask my father questions; wanted to ask him the likelihood of that happening, for if anybody would know, I thought, he would. But I didn’t want him to have to think about that possibility. I didn’t want him to have to consider that. So I remained quiet. But as we headed back toward the house I couldn’t stop this train of thought. For already I could picture the German soldiers arriving at Deyning, marauding about the place, pulling it apart and laughing loudly. And what would we do? What would I do? And what if it happened at night? Of course, of course it would happen at night, was bound to happen at night—under the cover of darkness. I’d have to have a gun, I thought . . . have to be able to defend myself. And I saw myself in my room, my locked door being broken down by laughing German soldiers as I stood brandishing a pistol.

  I took a deep breath. “Papa, I think I should have a gun,” I said. “I think we should all have a gun by our beds.”

  He laughed. “A gun? But you don’t know how to use a gun, Clarissa. And why ever do you need one?”

  I didn’t want to worry him, didn’t want to have to explain to him how things could unfold.

  “For reasons of safety, of course,” I said. “To defend myself and Deyning.”

  He turned to me. “You’re quite safe here, my dear. And you really don’t need a gun. At least not yet.”

  I didn’t notice August’s end, or September’s start. I was hungry only for news: news of the war. I read the newspaper, often from cover to cover and sometimes out loud, repeating entire paragraphs in order to try to comprehend them. As I read of battles, battalions and bombs, my world expanded and took on a different hue. I looked at fatality lists: incredulous, aghast. For how could so many be killed? They had only just gone. And though I tried to accept that my three brothers, along with Tom, were unseen players in that macabre daily news bulletin, it still seemed unreal. Life, our routines, continued at Deyning, but it was different. Everyone was already in some infinitesimal way altered by the sudden cessation of that summer.

  My mother, ever resourceful and fervently patriotic, threw herself wholeheartedly into the war effort. She attended the Appeal to Women meetings at the local village hall, and returned full of plans and ideas for a working party, informing my father that we should offer up all of our young and healthy horses, and asking him if the middle meadow could be used as a rifle range. She had endless meetings with Mr. Broughton to discuss how best to utilize the kitchen gardens, and even toyed with the idea of digging up the parterre in order to increase Deyning’s vegetable production. She briefed the servants on new rules concerning the running of the house, had the drawing room and ballroom shut up, and reassigned the usage of rooms in order to conserve coal. And she set about organizing all of us women at home to make war garments: balaclavas,* gloves, scarves and socks—anything deemed useful for our boys at the front.

  She had George’s new gramophone relocated to the morning room and, each evening after dinner, with the air of a colonel organizing his regiment, she rounded up her knitting party, which included Wilson, Mabel, Edna, Mrs. Cuthbert, and myself, fulfilling the role of a private, and delegated the unraveling and rewinding of balls of wool, and the sewing up of mittens. As we sat in a circle around the fire, serenaded by the crackling strains of Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, we seemed to knit and sew in time with the music. And I wondered who’d wear these things we’d made with so much fervor. Would they hear the music?

  “I was thinking, Mama, wouldn’t it be wonderful if these mittens were to end up on George or Henry or William’s hands?” (Or on Tom’s, I thought, glancing at Mrs. C.)

  “Really, Clarissa, I do so wish you’d think less and try to be a little more industrious,” she snapped back at me.

  Her weekly trips to London had stopped, and without them she seemed to me to be unnecessarily short tempered. Could her incessant train journeys and interviews with parlormaids and the like really be so important to her? One evening she’d burst into tears when I asked her if she’d one day take me to stay with her at the Empress Club. And I wondered then if she simply enjoyed the hurly-burly of travel and if there was not some neglected Romany spirit lurking beneath that immaculate, pale exterior.

  I wrote to Tom almost every day. And cycling to the end of the lane—where the road forks and the postbox stands in the middle of a triangle of grass—I felt the thrill of subterfuge: for I was having an illicit affair. Yes, it was a love affair, the beginning of a Great Love Affair, and the thought of him holding my letter in his hands, casting his eyes over my words, was intoxicating, heady stuff. When the weather became inclement I coerced Broughton into posting my letters for me. After all, he knew my secret, he’d seen me; seen us. And I’d already told Tom to send his letters to me via Broughton, at his cottage. Broughton appeared quite untroubled by this arrangement and became used to me, I’m sure, appearing at his door or by his side somewhere in the garden. He’d pull the paper from the pocket of his apron and hand it to me with a curious, knowing smile. But quite often he’d be with Mama, and usually in the greenhouse or the hothouse, bent over some tiny specimen in a terra-cotta pot, examining its possibilities. And then I’d swiftly turn.

  I sent Tom my watercolor of the lake, though I still wasn’t at all happy with it. But it was home, I thought, something for him to remember and hold on to; and I’d painted it for him. I shall treasure it, always, he wrote to me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he knew what or where it was. But did it matter?

  I told him of the magnificent white owl in the pine tree beyond my bedroom window; how I’d watched it fly off toward a huge silvery moon one night and imagined it was flying straight to him, carrying a tiny rolled-up note from me. But what would that tiny rolled-up note say? he’d asked. “That my heart beats only for you,” I replied. I told him about the enormous spider recently taken up residence outside my windowpane, its shimmering fly-filled web growing day by day. I like to think of that spider, he replied; I like to imagine I’m that spider, looking back at you through your window, watching you. I told him of my solitary afternoon excursions, rowing across the lake to the island: the water murky, the air damp and filled with smoke from bonfires. I shall row you there one day . . . I shall take you there, and spend the whole day listening to your voice, studying your face, he wrote. Do you think of me? Do you think of me now? I asked, hungry for more. Always, he replied. You’re my vision, Clarissa, my beacon of hope.

  I found myself seeking out Mrs. Cuthbert more and more; being with her made me feel closer to Tom, and I often had to stop myse
lf from blurting out her son’s news, having received a more up-to-date letter than she. I sat at the table in the kitchen, chatting to her, asking her questions, gathering whatever snippets I could: stories and anecdotes about his childhood, which I later recorded in my journal. There was never any mention of Mr. Cuthbert, and I’d long since dismissed Henry’s queer remark in the dining room that day. And Tom had told me anyway, told me what he knew: that his father had died shortly before he was born, that there’d only ever been him and his mother. But he must have been a tall man, I thought, a handsome man; and quite different to Tom’s mother, who, sweet as she was, was a diminutive woman with no obvious beauty. They looked so different, and Tom had such an entirely different demeanor to that of his mother. Sometimes it was hard for me to imagine that Mrs. Cuthbert had actually given birth to my Tom.

  We were still counting the war in days then. Sunday, November the first, was the ninetieth day, and in church we all prayed once again for a swift end to the fighting. Could it end by Christmas? Would my brothers and Tom be home by then? I imagined us all singing carols under the tree in the hallway, the war already in the past, already a memory.

  In one of his letters to me Tom quoted some lines from Blake, I think: To see the world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour . . .

  But I could tell by the tone, by the words he chose not to write, that he was living through something too awful to speak of. He never mentioned love, never mentioned the future, but he told me that he thought of me upon waking and when he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. I prayed for him in church, and for my brothers too. I thought of him as I walked through the grounds, had conversations with him in my head; I pictured him smiling; imagined his hand in mine, his lips touching mine; and each night I dreamed of him.

  I played games with myself, handing out questions for the universe to answer: if this pebble lands beyond the jetty, he’ll come back to me; if that leaf blows down from the roof, it means he’ll marry me; if the owl hoots once more it means I shall receive a letter from him in the morning post.