Chapter Eleven
Dearest T, I do what I believe is best for ALL of us, which is not always easy, & my responsibilities—to everyone—weigh heavily on me. I too cannot bear this reality, but what choice do we have? We must nurture brave hearts, & pray for peace & for all that is noble, and good and fine. I neither know nor understand what “might lie ahead,” but I do know that without US my life would be devoid of all hope and beauty. It makes me utterly and unbearably miserable to think of you lonely and sad, & to know also that it is beyond my power to ease your suffering, but I want to remind you how very close you are to my heart, now & always . . . and ever in my thoughts . . . in haste, Yr D
We remained at Deyning for only three days before returning to London, and for me it was a thoroughly miserable time. The house had been requisitioned and my parents and Mrs. Cuthbert were preoccupied with inventories, organizing the removal of paintings and any items of value. Mrs. Cuthbert, Mr. Broughton and a few others were to remain at the house, as caretakers, but my father was upset and agitated at the prospect of army personnel trampling through his precious home. “It’ll be wrecked,” he said, shaking his head. Huts for soldiers were going up on the grounds, and the whole place had already taken on a somewhat gloomy, neglected look. Windows now stood bare, their views somehow altered and made ordinary by their lack of lavish frame. Stripped of its furniture and glorious interior colors, Deyning had become like a museum emptied of its exhibits. Certain rooms were to be used for storage and would remain locked, their ghostly contents shrouded in dust sheets. Other things were to be transported to London. The rooms I’d known since childhood now stood bare of family treasures and personal memorabilia. The curtains, carpets, rugs and tapestries, which had for so long cushioned our existence, lending the place softness and warmth, had been taken down to be put away for the duration of the war, and the whole place echoed with an unfamiliar sadness.
“But what if the war ends soon?” I asked my mother. “What if we wish to come back here?”
“Sadly, I don’t think that will happen, Clarissa. People are saying that this war may go on for years.”
I sat upon the staircase, watching Broughton and the few remaining men from the estate carrying endless tea chests and crates, furniture and carpets. Back and forth, and back and forth across the marble floor, directing each other as they maneuvered larger pieces through doorways.
“Steady there . . . a little to the left . . . that’s it. Careful now . . .”
I felt as though I was watching the dismantling of a stage set; theater in itself. I watched as they carefully carried Mama’s portrait—covered in a blanket—from the drawing room through the front door and out to a waiting wagon. It was moving to London along with us. I watched them carefully take down the chandelier in the hallway, for that, too, was moving up to London. I shuffled along the step as Wilson and Mrs. Cuthbert trudged up and down the staircase carrying hatboxes, bags, and tied bundles of linens and towels.
I remembered all the Christmases we’d celebrated, always with a huge tree situated next to the staircase where I now sat. As a child, I’d sat upon that same step, huddled up against the balusters, studying the tree, its shape and decorations; enthralled by the magical light and shadows upon the walls around me. Dancing. Over Christmas the only light in the hallway had come from the silver candelabra burning on the hallway table. But on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day night small candles were attached to the branches of the tree, their soft light reflected in the vast chandelier suspended high above and thrown back across the walls like stars across the universe. I remembered the smell, that mingling of pine and wax and burning logs: the smell of home, the smell of happiness. I’d sat there in my nightgown, listening to the chime of crystal; the laughter, music and voices emanating from another room, an adult world I could only imagine. And always hoping for a glimpse of Mama, as she whooshed across the marble floor, beautiful, resplendent . . . invincible.
It was nearly always Stephens, my nursemaid, who’d find me there and march me back up to the nursery floor. “But I only wanted to see Mama,” I’d plead, as she secured the gate at the top of the stairs.
“Your mama is busy, Miss Clarissa; you know that. And she wouldn’t be pleased to see you running about the place in your nightgown, now would she?”
I wasn’t sure. Would she be so displeased? Mama loved me. She told me so. More than anything in the world, she said. Stephens didn’t know this of course. Stephens didn’t understand. How could she? She didn’t have a mama like mine.
Quite often Stephens found me hiding behind the jardinière in the corner of the hallway, trying desperately to align myself with its narrow stand, trying to be invisible; but my usual hiding place had been inside the dumbwaiter, which carried Mama’s breakfast tray and meals up to the nursery floor each day. Oh, how much fun my brothers and I had had playing in that! We’d sent each other up and down and up and down, with Henry inevitably in charge of the pulley, as the rest of us gathered intelligence, spying on Mama and the servants . . . and hiding from Stephens and the dreaded Miss Greaves. And only once did it get stuck: with poor Georgie inside it. The ropes had become tangled—from overuse, Stephens later said. We could hear his desperate cries for help echoing throughout the house, as though he were trapped down a very deep well. And then, when I became somewhat hysterical and began to cry, because I really did wonder if we’d ever get him back, Henry had shouted at me to shut up, which had only made me cry all the more.
Of course those childhood games and adventures had long since ceased, but they remained a part of Deyning, a part of the world I was leaving.
“You all right there, miss? Not too cold?” Wilson asked as she passed me on the stairs.
I was freezing. Without carpets and furniture the house was cold, and colder still from every door standing open to the elements, and the air had a dusty, acrid smell to it. But I continued to sit there, lost in the warmth of my memories. Occasionally Mama appeared, directing operations with a slight frown but a steady, calm voice. My father remained in his library, among his last remaining boxes of books. Later, in her boudoir, Mama told me how hard it was for him.
“This place is everything to him . . . everything,” she said, tearfully. “We must rally him, Clarissa. You mustn’t allow him to see you looking so miserable . . . otherwise he will feel even sadder.” But I realized at that moment that she was speaking of herself. Though my father was unsettled by the upheaval and chaos around him, he was essentially a pragmatic man. It seemed to me that it was Mama who was shaken and sad. And I was surprised, and wondered why, because she’d been the one who’d wanted to hand the place over to the army, and to the Belgian refugees; and because I was unused to seeing my mother upset or agitated by anything. And it still seemed so unnecessary. Why did our home have to be packed away? Why could Papa not have said “no” to the army? It was his home after all.
My parents’ grim acceptance of a long war shocked me. It seemed defeatist in itself; a blindly pessimistic acquiescence in something which had for me, up until that point, at least, been a temporary state; something which could be endured and lived through, and then, at its end, normality restored. But their quiet acknowledgment of a long struggle ahead and the sight of our home, our lives, being dismantled and packed away for an indefinite period shook me out of that dream. And it made me begin to realize that perhaps I hadn’t fully come to terms with what was taking place across Europe.
. . . I don’t understand why you haven’t written, and now my heart is fit to burst & I feel even more desperate, because we are leaving here, leaving Deyning, & I shan’t be here when you return (there is no IF, only WHEN). Today I walked down through the meadow to the lake & I thought only of you, I thought of you all day, & all day yesterday, and the day before that . . . If this reaches you, please write to me . . . write to me in London. Everything here is truly awful, but nothing compared to what you’re going through . . . Oh my darling, I love you, I do love you, & I don’t
care what you say about waiting until this thing is over . . . I know only what I FEEL.
On our last night at Deyning we retired to our beds early. With nothing of comfort to sit upon—and nothing much to look upon—it seemed the only thing to do. In my bedroom I stood for a while in my nightgown looking out of the window. But there was little to see or bid adieu to. The moon lay on its back, slumped in the distance beyond the trees: a bright white sliver of a crescent rocking low in the blackness, like a deflated balloon, which had shrivelled and then slipped.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I slept badly that night, my dreams filled with Deyning, and angst-ridden conversations with a whole array of people about its future. And for the first time in years another dream came back to me.
When I was young I’d had a recurring dream about an invisible door, a kind of opening in the ceiling of the drawing room, through which all sorts of strange children were able to enter the house. Literally, dropped in from above. That night I dreamed I was standing in that place once again, and this time the sun shone down through the invisible hole in the ceiling. I felt its heat, and an utterly sublime sense of peace. Then, through the sunshine, it began to rain, and as I stood there, my arms outstretched under that heavenly shower, and looking up into the light, a tiny girl fell through the hole to my feet. She was a child, but so very, very small, with black hair and the brightest blue eyes. She smiled up at me with perfect white teeth. “He’s always here,” she said, pointing. I turned, and looked into darkness. And when I turned back to her—she’d gone.
Early the following morning, before setting off for London, I stood on the terrace with Papa watching armored biplanes fly over the house. Like a swarm of tiny toy flying machines they buzzed high above us, moving in and out of mist and low cloud.
Will . . .
My brother William, by now attached to the Royal Flying Corps, had been taught to fly in a matter of weeks, and had only recently been deployed to the war zone, piloting one of those tiny wooden biplanes over the muddy fields of France and Flanders. I turned to my father, and when I saw his face he looked so different to the Papa of my childhood: anxious and, suddenly, old.
I took his hand in mine. “Don’t worry, Papa, God will keep William safe.”
He looked down, shook his head. “I’m not so sure . . . no, I’m not so sure God can keep them safe.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, gripping his hand. “We have to keep faith . . . we have to. The war will end one day soon,” I went on determinedly, and despite knowing that no one, least of all my father, believed this. “Then things will go back to normal. All will be as it was.”
I’d never heard my father talk like that, never seen him look so troubled.
He sighed, looked skywards again. “Yes, yes, the war will end one day, Clarissa—it has to—but England will be a different place, the world will be a different place . . .” He turned to me. “And you know, I rather liked things as they were. I’ve never wished for change . . . and I’m too old for it now,” he added, releasing my hand and walking away.
I took one last look across the ragged, uncut lawns. The air smelled of decay and rotting vegetation, and a chilled gray mist hung over the place, almost but not quite obliterating color and shape, but blurring lines, rendering everything in front of me gloomy and drab: a ghost of what she once was, I thought.
Minutes later, as our motorcar pulled away, I turned and looked back at the house. In front of it stood Mrs. Cuthbert, Mr. Broughton and the handful of servants who’d helped to pack the place up. And as we moved away, down the long avenue of beech trees, I watched them become smaller and smaller, and smaller still, until they disappeared into the stone façade of Deyning, and then, finally, it disappeared too. As we passed by the white gate and turned out on to the road I wondered if we’d ever again live at Deyning, if life would ever be the way it used to be. And I thought of him, somewhere in France. He’d return there, God willing, but I’d no longer be there. Deyning was not part of my life any more, and, it seemed, neither was he.
. . . When we finally arrived in the town we simply flooded the place, & then lay about in the streets waiting to find out where we were to be billeted. A few of the chaps here seem to think the worst is over, & we’re all praying, hoping that this is the case, and that by the time our turn comes we’ll have had some good news . . . but in truth I know this is unlikely. Anyway, I am in a small farm cottage with five others, and a fire! So for now, at least, I am warm, and able to think . . . think of you.
PART TWO
Chapter Twelve
We regret to inform you . . . the telegram began. Seen to fall . . . shot down over enemy lines.
I didn’t and couldn’t believe the words, though I saw them for myself. For how could my brother William be dead? He’d only just learned to fly, only just gone. And the war would surely be over soon. It was a mistake, it had to be. There’d be another telegram, I told Mama; another one to tell us that they’d made a mistake. He was twenty years old. People didn’t die at that age, didn’t get killed. His face flashed before me, animated, laughing; alive. It was a mistake, it had to be; a dreadful mistake. But I saw the line in my mother’s brow, an ever-deepening line. I saw my parents’ grief. And the sight of them sobbing into each other’s arms told me that the only mistake was my heart’s inability to accept my brother’s fate. William had been killed. And I kept saying it to myself: William is dead . . . William is dead.
Weeks after we’d learned of Will’s death Papa took ill with pneumonia, and my mother’s grief was postponed while she focused her attention and energy on him. The doctor came to the house each morning, and as I stood on the landing, straining to hear the hushed conversation below me, I heard him repeat one word: grief. I wondered then if Papa felt guilty, for he’d been the one who had persuaded William, eventually, to go and fight. I’d heard them arguing in the library, days before William signed up. “No son of mine will be a shirker!” Papa had said, and in an unusually loud and angry voice.
Of course, there could be no funeral for Will: like so many others, his body, what—if anything—was left of him, could never be recovered. All that had been returned to us were a few items of uniform, two books and some letters. I pondered on that, and on those words, seen to fall. But I could not bear to think of my brother falling from the sky; hurtling toward the ground, on fire, knowing he was about to die. It was too much. And without a body, without evidence, how could they know for sure that he’d been killed? Could he have survived? Was it possible? Sometimes this train of thought offered me a glinting light of hope. I imagined Will arriving back at home, laughing at us for thinking him dead, and then explaining that he’d been on some secret mission: undercover, behind enemy lines. It was possible. It could happen. At other times it made sense to me that my brother, the theology student, the one closest to God, had been plucked from this life in the heavens. I’d close my eyes. Of course! William didn’t spiral back down to earth; he simply cast off that reluctant soldier’s body . . . his soul remains up there, in the sky. William: an angel.
I thought of Tom, wondered where he was. Did he think of me still? Did he remember me? I tried to recall our conversations, but fact and fiction had muddled themselves, and I couldn’t now be sure if some of the lines I credited him with were mine and not his. I tried to picture his face, those dark solemn eyes, but already his image had begun to fade. Sometimes his face would come to me, in all its beauty, and then slip away again. And I’d struggle, struggle so hard to conjure it back, focusing on a specific moment . . . that evening by the ha-ha, when I’d watched him as he smoked his cigarette; and I could almost picture his profile. But like every other cherished memory of that last summer, it too had faded. I tried to remember his kiss, the feel of his lips upon mine, but it seemed as though that memory, too, was slipping away from me.
Don’t leave me; never leave me.
My mother forgot all about parties and balls. She spent her days scouring the newspaper for names she
knew, searching through the Roll of Honour, tracking the movement of regiments, battalions, and events over there. Henry was mentioned in dispatches, and so too was Jimmy Cooper. But a son’s fearlessness on a battlefield in another country only exacerbated the sense of fear and dread at home. And, rather than an end in sight, we appeared to be going further and further away from the beginning, from that point of faith and hope and optimism.
Long numbers, numbers with more zeroes than I’d ever seen before, were printed each day: 500,000 men to Romania; 300,000 more men needed; 70,000 more men dispatched 126,000 men taken prisoner, 258,000 casualties . . . endless numbers, printed in heavy black ink. We read of the German prisoners transported to Frimley, where crowds had gone to see them—only to discover they’d already been transported to the Isle of Man. We read of the German submarines off the coast, torpedoes and air raids; bombs dropped on familiar seaside resorts up and down the country. And we read of the continuing struggle at Ypres. We read about asphyxiating gases and pulled out the encyclopedia; of the events in Basra, the Dardanelles and Gallipoli—and pulled out the atlas. We read of the sinking of the Lusitania and of more airship raids on the coast. And in the early hours of the morning of May the thirty-first the Zeppelin arrived, and we heard the bombs fall on London.
Together and separately we surveyed the endless daily images of war published in the Illustrated London News: double-page black and white photographs straight from the front; drawings of scenes of carnage, our troops and the fighting. I studied these pictures with a morbid fascination, for the churned-up, charred landscape they depicted was unlike any I had ever seen or could ever—even in my worst nightmares—have imagined. It was the landscape of Hell. And the notion that Tom or my brothers could be one of the murky figures in the foreground was too horrendous to contemplate.
The Last Summer Page 11