The Last Summer

by Judith Kinghorn

  I remember a white moth among the pink rosebuds of my bedroom wall. A small white moth. The only one. It came one day and seemed reluctant to leave, even when I held open the window and tried to coax it out to freedom. Sometimes it moved to another rosebud, another wall, but it was never drawn to the open window. Then, perhaps two days after it first appeared, I could no longer find it amidst the buds upon my wall. I searched the pattern, searched the floor, and then, finally, I found it on the window sill. I picked it up, held it in the palm of my hand. And I wondered again why God created so many beautiful but infinitely fragile things.

  I stretched my arm out through the open window, willing it to live. Fly . . . fly . . . I watched it as the breeze swept it from my hand. Watched it fall through the air and land upon the roof below. And there it lay, completely still.

  The next morning it had gone. I couldn’t be sure if the wind hadn’t picked up that tiny white moth, carrying it further across the rooftops of London. But I like to think it had flown.

  Strange, the things we remember.

  . . . Last night five of us went out on a listening patrol. We crawled on our bellies through a gap in the wire—through the mud into no-man’s-land—and tried to get as close as we could. We couldn’t hear anything, nothing at all, and no one speaks or even understands German anyway—so it was a hopeless, pointless exercise &—in my opinion—v badly thought through . . . but then so much is here. I suppose the COs are desperate, we’re all desperate.

  It was Henry who said it, and at the time I was grateful.

  Tom.

  Hearing his name spoken out loud broke a spell, made him real, and released me from a promise; a solemn but unsigned agreement that had become a burden to my conscience. He said he’d seen him with her at a party; that it was quite obvious they were “at it.”

  Rose and Tom . . .

  “Jeepers, do you remember when you had such a crush on him, Issa?”

  “No, not really,” I said. “We were friends, Henry, that’s all.”

  We were friends . . . that’s all.

  “Rubbish. You had the hots for him—and in a big way, as I recall. And you know? I think he rather liked you too.”

  . . . He rather liked me.

  “So, did you speak to him?” I asked, without looking up from my book.

  “Yes, of course I spoke to him. I quite like him actually. Doesn’t seem to care too much what people think, which is . . . really rather refreshing.”

  “And so . . . what did he say?”

  “Oh, this and that. Where he’d been . . . he’s an officer now.”

  . . . Captain Tom Cuthbert.

  “Yes, I know. Did he ask after Mama?”

  “He asked me about you. Said he’d heard of your engagement, asked when the wedding was,” he replied, removing his shoes, putting his feet up on the ottoman.

  “And what did you say?”

  “Said I didn’t know, that it would all depend on when Charlie was next home and when you both deemed it necessary, ha!”

  “And how long . . . how long has he been seeing Rose?” I asked, closing my book, looking up at him.

  “Haven’t the foggiest. But I can’t imagine her parents know. If they did they’d be livid. Anyway, what is it with him? I mean, I know he’s handsome and all, but he has nothing.”

  . . . He has nothing; he is no one; can never be one of us.

  “It’s not his wealth then, is it?” I replied. “But you know, people don’t select who to fall in love with according to their wealth or lineage, Henry.”

  He narrowed his eyes and looked at me quizzically for a moment; opened his mouth as if about to say something, then thought the better of it and said nothing.

  “It may be the case with who they choose to marry, but not where love’s concerned,” I added.

  “Hark you, my wise sister. And where, pray tell, does this newfound knowledge come from? Or are you thinking back with regret and longing to dear old Cuthie?”

  I managed a smile. “Not at all. And I’m quite sure Rose Millington shan’t marry Tom Cuthbert. She’s much too ambitious. But she’ll enjoy his attention. He’s . . . quite intense, and women like that—for a while at least.”

  I looked away, saw Tom staring into Rose’s pale eyes, his lips moving toward hers.

  “You’re all the same: fickle,” Henry continued. “You want everything . . .” He paused, sighed. “The promise of eternal love and adoration, and then, when you think you have it, when you think you have it all, you no longer want it. Isn’t that true?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Well? Isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t believe men are any different. You all long for what you don’t own and can’t afford, and as soon as you own it, as soon as you’re sure of it—it loses its appeal. So, perhaps it’s a human trait and not specific to either sex.”

  “Ha! Yes, but it’s the unattainable that’s always the most desirable.”

  “The unattainable . . .” I repeated. And the poignancy of that word hit me like another blow.

  He stretched out in his chair and sighed. “Have you noticed how old and cynical we sound now, dear?” he said.

  “I suppose that’s what the war has done to us,” I replied.

  Later, I sat at my dressing table, staring at my reflection in the looking glass. I would soon be twenty-one; I would soon be married. I hadn’t heard his name in so long, and Henry’s blasé mention of him had thrown me more than I’d realized. One syllable, one syllable was all it took. He had been a moment in my life, a wonderful reckless moment, nothing more. Nothing more, I told myself out loud. I picked up my hairbrush, moved it slowly through my hair. An unsmiling face stared back at me, beseeching me. And when I closed my eyes it was still there. “He used you,” Mama had said, but I knew he hadn’t used me any more than I had used him. My heart ached for him and for our baby, the child whose existence he knew nothing of; the child I’d given away, handed over to a stranger like an unwanted parcel. I clutched my stomach, felt myself begin to shake, and somewhere—somewhere in the distance—I could hear someone crying: great convulsing, breathless sobs. I put my hands to my mouth; heard his name, muffled, desperate; and then a shout, followed by another, and then another. I saw a girl sitting on a pink carpet in my white nightgown, swaying to and fro, rocking empty arms. And the sadness I felt for her was overwhelming.

  I don’t remember Mama entering my room. In fact, I can’t recall anything that happened in the subsequent days and weeks.

  . . . Four men were shot for desertion this morning. They’d been here for 3 or 4 months, & without any break . . . Every few days the names are read out to us—as a warning, but some would rather face a firing squad than stay here another day. Last week another young boy in my battalion was shot. He’d become hysterical, lost his nerve and couldn’t face going back into the line. He was tied to what was once a tree, in his civilian clothes, a piece of white cloth pinned over his heart. Now, rumor has it, his father and uncle are joining up to avenge his death on the Germans . . . What are we doing? Why are Englishmen shooting Englishmen? Best to suspend all thought & reason.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dearest T, I have delayed my response to your last simply because it was (to me) incomprehensible. There is no hypocrisy on my part, is there on yours? I endeavor to do what I believe is right for each of us, and this in itself is a burden to me, and yes, to my conscience, which I now realize is that part of me you neither understand nor have any desire to understand . . . and I am deeply sorry if I have failed you. Do not for one moment think I am untouched or untroubled by this, I have given it a great deal of thought, but it is the only way, & nothing to do with being part of any “smart set.” Dearest, you speak of love as though it were a thing beyond morality—or what is decent—and yet didn’t you also once tell me how inherently noble and good Love is? Can you not see how it would be otherwise? I’m afraid there was no alternative. Yrs, D

  Was it some sort
of nervous breakdown? I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’d heard that phrase then, or even if it had been invented. But weeks slipped by and I rarely left my room; I didn’t want to, couldn’t face anyone, couldn’t face life. Dr. Riley came to call once or twice, but he spoke to my mother and not to me. He prescribed tablets; to help me sleep, Mama said. But I didn’t need tablets to help me sleep; I needed tablets to help me wake up, to help me wake up from my nightmare. The only person I saw, apart from Mama and the doctor, was Venetia, once, when she came up to my room to see me. She brought me a silk scarf from Liberty’s and was as effervescent as ever.

  “Your mama’s told me you’ve been a little off color, dear; not quite yourself since you returned from Devon . . .”

  I tried to smile.

  “Well, really, it was always a bad idea. I told your Mama that at the time . . . I said to her, ‘Edina, Devon is so terribly, terribly damp, and so very far away!’” She reached out, stroked my cheek. “Poor child, I’m not surprised, not surprised in the least that you’ve returned here lackluster and depressed. I should too, I’d imagine—had I been sent there!”

  She went on to give me her summary of news, a catalog of backdated events I’d missed, and snippets of gossip, punctuated every so often by a roll of the eyes, a sigh or a shrug.

  But I didn’t hear any of it. I watched her as though I was watching someone on a stage, a character from a play; I even saw myself upon the same stage: the sickly girl in the bed. And I found myself wondering about Venetia and her life. Had she ever known heartache or loss? Perhaps she had. But it struck me that day how childlike she was, the extraordinary result of a life spent in a rarefied, cosseted world. The world I’d once been destined for. And suddenly I felt years older than my godmother, a woman who had only ever ventured beyond Mayfair to attend the theater or the opera, or to stay in a grand country house. But I was different, I realized. And, though Venetia saw the same Clarissa, lying next to her, albeit pale and lackluster, I was already changed, already altered by the path of my life. I would never be the person I’d once been destined to become.

  I wondered who her latest lover was, which young officer was dedicating poetry to her from the trenches, and what she said to them. Did she speak to them of love? Is that what it was that drew them to her? Or was it something else? Yes, she was beautiful, and yes, she was voluptuous, but was that enough to sustain them? And then it dawned on me: perhaps it was. Perhaps Venetia, with her love of all things frivolous and gay, and her tactile maternal ways, offered them a backward glance; reminding them of that other time, what they had left behind; what we had all of us left behind.

  Later, I heard them on the landing, talking. “Well, you know Clarissa. She’s always been a sensitive creature . . . always felt life a little too much. And this blasted war . . . our own losses have hit her hard,” Mama said, and I smiled, as much at her ingenuity as her disingenuousness.

  When I remembered the time before the war, it was the light I remembered most of all. As though the killing fields of France and Flanders had released tiny particles into the atmosphere, filtering out the sun’s rays, absorbing that brightness I remembered. And with each year the air had grown thicker and darker still. And with each year my memories of that time had intensified in their luminosity; cherished snapshots now phosphorescent beacons.

  Can it really be three summers since we all sat about on the lawn, like children, drinking lemonade, the boys full of bravado and desperate to impress the girls? Has it only been three years?

  At night I’d pull back the curtains of my bedroom window and stare out across the darkened city. I’d follow the searchlight’s nervous beam up, up, up through the clouds into the inky black sky, staring into heaven, seeking out the enemy. Like a wound healing, there was a nerve in me slowly coming back to life. The ache for my baby had lessened; now only occasionally did I experience that gnawing agony, that wrench. And I’d learned to live with it. I had to. I’d limited my thoughts of her to the abstract. She was a name, and though she was my baby, in my mind she had to become a baby. I could not bear to think of anything specific as to her situation or her whereabouts; whether she was lying in a cot of some far-flung orphanage, alone, or in someone else’s arms, looking up into their eyes. I simply couldn’t follow her path, either in reality or in my imagination. I’d handed her over, I’d given her away, and in doing so I had no rights to any imagined smile or gurgle. But sometimes, alone in my room, I said her name out loud.

  “Emily . . . Emily Cuthbert.”

  “There’ll be another. There’ll be more babies for you. You’ll see, when the time is right . . . when you’re a little older, married,” one of the sisters had said to me, shortly before I left Plymouth, as though my grief was for a misplaced favorite hat.

  I’m sure that Mama, and Charlie too, thought that planning our wedding would give me something to look forward to, something to help me recover from whatever it was I was suffering from. But I had no interest in any wedding, least of all my own. So, as Mama brought swatches of duchesse satin and silks to my room for me to hold and compare, I feigned preferences for this one or that. She sat patiently with her notebook in hand, listing guests we’d need to invite: a depressing task in itself, due to the names of those absent from that list or any future list. She made a point of being cheery, talking of the future, never the past. And she never mentioned Papa, or Will, or George. She never mentioned Deyning, or Tom Cuthbert, and of course she never mentioned my baby.

  “When the war is over,” she said to me one day, “I shall take you to Paris, darling. You never had your time there, I’m quite aware of that. I’ll take an apartment . . . and we’ll do all the things you always wished to do. We’ll shop on the rue St. Honore . . . visit Worth . . . go to the Louvre. Would you like that?”

  “Yes, Mama. That would be nice.”

  Sometimes she’d look into my eyes with such sadness in her own that I wondered what, exactly, she wanted to say; for I sensed her burden, the weight of words unspoken, still longing to be said. But my mother had never allowed herself such freedom. Truth was something one held tight, like honor and sacrifice, and all those other now tattered ideals she hung on to. And I wondered how many words she’d never uttered; how many tears she’d never shed; how many secrets she held in her heart, and all those words, all those words she’d never allowed herself to say.

  But I knew three of them, at least. Three words she’d never utter, no matter what. Because speaking them would mean admitting a mistake; and Mama never made a mistake. And yet, already, I knew that I had: I’d made a mistake in agreeing to marry Charlie. I was fond of him, I loved him—loved him like a brother, but I could not marry him; I could not lie, say “I do” and become his wife.

  I decided not to speak to my mother about this. It was between me and Charlie, and no one else. For a while I contemplated writing to him, to try to explain. I composed a few different versions of a letter to him in my head. But it seemed so cruel, so uncaring, to put those words of rejection—no matter how dressed up—down on paper, and then post them out to him, with a “love from Clarissa” at the end. I imagined him in some dark and muddy trench, leaning against a pile of filthy sandbags, reading my letter, his heart aching . . . his heart breaking. And I couldn’t do it. It would have to wait. I’d tell him in person.

  . . . I too am sorry. I do not speak about it because I do not wish to, and, I imagine, neither does she. She is fine, a little fragile, and—as ever—somewhat distracted, but she is moving on with her life, and this is good. I try so very hard to be brave, to keep faith, but I am severely tested. I am weary of writing letters of condolence, of trying to find words—which no longer seem to carry any meaning or weight. What can one say? We have all suffered, & too much for any words of sympathy . . . and the sight of more weeping mothers in the street—preceded by yet another Union Jack–covered coffin, cause me to question everything I once believed in, & all that I am.

  Chapter Eighteen

  . .
. I am not sure where to send this letter, or even if I will post it, but I want you to know that I forgive you. I forgive you for not writing to me, I forgive you for abandoning me, & I forgive you for not caring about what has become of me. Shall I tell you? Shall I let you in on the secret? Well, for a while I went quite doolally, oh yes, quite doolally-lally. In fact, I may even still be, in which case you can ignore everything I write here and resume normal duties. You see, I’m not altogether sure that I’m equipped to deal with this war, this bloody bloody bloody stupid bloody war, & this awful life. No one issued me with a tin hat, or a uniform, or any armor, and I shall never be awarded anything. I shall receive no badge or medals, and no one is allowed to know . . . will ever know. Oh, but I forgot, it’s different for me, isn’t it? I don’t need to “win” anything. I must be content with loss, & losing . . .

  For me there was no beginning, no middle and no end, there was just one long and bloody war. I tried to imagine a time when there would be no war, but that great well of optimism, like my sense of patriotism, had almost run dry. I tried to remember that summer, the summer before the war, but it seemed to me a lifetime ago. And it was. It was hundreds of thousands of lifetimes ago. For how many had gone? Everyone I knew had lost brothers, cousins, lovers, fiancés, and friends. And yet we, the young still living, browbeaten by numbers and anesthetized by grief, clung to our stale dreams and shriveled hopes, and that fine silver thread, the future.

  Sometimes I smiled when I wanted to cry, and cried when I should have been laughing. We all did. I can recall so many occasions when repressed, muddled emotions resulted in someone inadvertently laughing at a piece of tragic news, or bursting into tears at a joke. We spoke of death the way one speaks of the weather: “Did you hear so-and-so had been killed?” had become a standard point in any conversation, usually immediately after a “How are you?”