by Peter Rimmer
"Who?"
"Your friend Jack Merryweather."
"Then that makes it different… Hello Jack. How's the arm? Didn't see you come in, old chap… You alone?"
"Come and join us Robert, for coffee. You know who she is as well as I do. Shown you her photograph enough times over there."
"Why no uniform?"
"Burnt it. New one be ready tomorrow. I have a daughter."
"Jolly good… Did that woman catch you at the door?"
"Fred saved the day."
"Good for Fred, whoever he is. I can't afford these places myself."
Fay watched Jack make his way back to her with pride. He had lost a lot of weight in the trenches but there was more purpose in his walk. As if he had something to do that was important. He looked older than his thirty-five years but so did all of them. None of them would ever be the same, even if they came out of the war alive. It would live with them forever. She smiled up at the father of her daughter who still did not have a name. She had been waiting for Jack. Only if he had been killed was she going to do something on her own.
"They're coming over for coffee and a brandy. Met Robert in Africa… I'm going to take you to Africa when all this is over. You've heard me talk of Harry Brigandshaw? He came over and joined the Royal Flying Corps. They're teaching him to fly Sopwith Pup biplanes. Best of our fighters. He's a lieutenant. That was one of the letters I read this morning when we went to the house."
"Are you really going to take me to Africa, Jack?"
"I said I would. When all this is over. A celebration."
"When will it be over?"
"Not for a while. Jolly good of Harry to come over and help. He's a Rhodesian. English stock of course. They're growing tobacco out there for the troops. Saves bringing it across the Atlantic from America. And it's cheaper. Harry says America put up the price of tobacco a month after war broke out. Someone always makes money in a war. Merlin, Robert's brother over there, has made a small fortune having the nous to buy Vickers-Armstrong shares just before war broke out. They make the machine guns that kill most of the Germans. In Germany, the lucky chap was the one that brought Krupp shares. What Herr Krupp makes kills us. Silly really. And we all pray to the same Christian God out there. There never has been any sense to war. Just every now and again it has to be done. As I said, rather silly but there it is."
Together they listened to the dance music in silence.
"What do you want to call our daughter?" Fay was trying not to cry about the war.
"Oh, Mary. Definitely. My mother's name was Mary… What do you call her now?"
"Baba… You want my child named after your mother! I'm your mistress Jack, not your wife."
"Doesn't make her any less my daughter… There's a new clause in my trust. Or will be. Jared Wentworth's out in the Atlantic with the Royal Navy. He is my stockbroker. There's talk of convoys for the merchant ships. The Huns sinking far too much tonnage. Underwater boats. From the depths they fire torpedoes… Jared's office will change the trust. You and Mary will always be all right, Fay."
"She won't be without a father, however much money."
"Don't pooh-pooh money. Money is important. Or rather it is not important when you have it… The one thing I can never understand is where Robert St Clair puts all the food. He's as skinny as a rake… He's going right through the menu. We had better dance. It's going to be awhile before they come across."
"I can't dance," said Fay.
"Don't worry. The dance floor's so small and with so many couples we just sway to the music. Just an excuse for people to hold each other."
"Do you need an excuse, Jack?" she was smiling again.
"No I don't. Come on. It's a waltz. A slow waltz. Not one by that Austrian Strauss."
There was no one on the platform at Corfe Castle railway station and the weather was bleak. Merlin pushed open the door to the waiting room. It was freezing inside. No one had lit the fire for days. The grate was full of old ash. He had a slight hangover from the previous night. After doing the right thing with Jack Merryweather, drinking coffee with a snifter of brandy, Robert had kicked him under the table on the shin. They left the happy couple, and went on to a club, but did not find any girls even though he and Robert were in uniform. Neither of them tried very hard. Seeing Jack and Fay look at each other that way made little sense of casual acquaintances.
They had caught a cab back to Merlin's empty flat in the Barbican and Robert had slept on the couch. They travelled down the next morning to their ancestral home in civilian clothes. There were two women at Waterloo Station handing out feathers. In passing one of them, Robert went into an elaborate limp. Ten yards further on he walked up straight and the women began running after them. They changed trains twice before getting off at Corfe Castle. The last part of the journey they spent alone.
"Well, I'm not going to walk," said Robert. "Fun in the spring. Even pleasant in summer. But not in the winter. When Harry Brigandshaw first came down I made him walk. Lucinda was in love the moment she clapped eyes on him. She was only fifteen. Poor Cinda. I've told Harry to come down here if he gets any leave, so you never know… Not even a sign of old Pringle. Do you remember how Mrs Pringle used to make us those sandwiches? There was always a pickled onion. Then we'd bring her a chicken. Nothing will ever be the same."
"Stop moaning Robert. Nothing can ever be the same twice, or it wouldn't be the same. Now wouldn't it?… You did phone father? Well, we walk. And fast. Marching pace of light infantry. Will be home in less than two hours. Come on. No one will steal our luggage from the waiting room. They've all gone."
"What happens if someone takes the high road and we're walking along by the river?"
"We leave them a note, stupid."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"Why they made you a captain, I have no idea."
"Neither have I… By the bye. Thanks for supper last night. Not sure when we'll get a slap-up meal like that again."
"Don't be morbid. You can always rely on mother and Granny Forrester… Best foot forward. March."
"And the note!"
"Of course."
"Now how they made you a captain is an even bigger point of contention."
"Do you have a pen?"
"Of course I have a pen. I'm a schoolmaster."
They had not gone fifty yards when they heard the horse and trap. Lord St Clair, their father, was holding the reins. They were all very cold when they reached the manor house.
Lucinda's fiancé, they found out, was John Heynes, a lieutenant in the Irish Guards. He had died on the third day of reaching the Western Front, blown apart by a German whizz-bang. There had been nothing to bury. They hugged their youngest sister but everyone was restrained. The brothers were due back in Flanders in four days' time. Robert wondered if the fear was not greater for their mother. No one mentioned Frederick on his way to France. His ship was to dock at Calais, so there was no home leave. Too many men needed to be replaced quickly. No one mentioned the family doctor was now Doctor Smithers for fear of bringing up the deaths of his two sons, with a third still alive and fighting. If the family had not emigrated from Germany as Reichwalds, the three sons would have been fighting on the other side.
Annabel was at home with nowhere else to go. Her impressionist painter, Geoffrey Winckle, had swapped his paintbrush for a rifle. He was a corporal in an infantry regiment. Merlin was now sure he would never see his ten pounds he had loaned his brother-in-law. They had not had any children. They had been happy for the short while. Merlin rather envied them in a way. The day after Robert and Merlin arrived back at Purbeck Manor, a letter arrived from Geoffrey Winckle saying he was now a sergeant. Someone, he said, for a reason he did not understand had put him in for a medal. With the letter were four canvases he had done in charcoal. Robert and Merlin shuddered at the reality. Their brother-in-law was very good. All four canvases depicted the hell in the trenches. Robert even smelled the dead
bodies by looking at the pictures. It seemed a pity to use good canvas for charcoal but what else could he use in the trenches.
Genevieve was away in Norfolk living with her mother-in-law. Her father-in-law, who had once been a professional soldier, was back in France commanding a battalion. Her husband was in the same battalion. Robert and Merlin read one of their sister's letters. It was as bleak as the Norfolk winter. The two women were trying to farm the family estate. They had recruited four young women to help them. All the young men from the village were away or dead. It was the same at Purbeck Manor. Two land girls from Corfe Castle and Lord St Clair looked after the pigs. The cows had been sold, as no one knew how to milk them except Lord St Clair and his fingers were bent with arthritis.
Merlin gave his mother fifty pounds without telling his father or anyone else. When the war was over he would buy some more cows. Two of the family portraits in the hall gave him a smile. He was sure of it. Their eyes followed him. Twice he smiled back at them. One of the portraits was over three hundred years old and dark with age. The eyes were alive. The eyes were smiling. Merlin stopped going into the hall, preferring to go outside through the French doors in the lounge. He knew more than anyone else the meaning of his name Merlin. He even knew he was going to survive the war. He never thought about his brothers for fear of finding the truth. Like Fay Wheels, he saw things others never saw.
Granny Forrester was certain all the boys were going to die but never said a word. She blamed herself for loving one man and marrying another. She missed Cousin Potts more than she could ever have imagined. They were companions, comfortable in silence, feeling safe and whole together. If his first posting to an obscure colony in the South Seas had not been so sudden it might have been different. Cousins they might have been but they only found out about each other for a week. Potts had proposed. Gave her hours to make up her mind. Her father had put his foot down firmly. No first cousins were ever again going to marry in the family. The bloodline was too intermarried as it was. And much later had come Richard, her eldest grandson, and the flaw in the family genes again came to the surface. In their old age they had been together under the same roof. Maybe it was not living in sin. They were too old for physical comfort. The Reverend Reichwald, the family doctor's brother, now Smithers, frowned at them in church sitting next to each other in the St Clair's family pew. It was their silly gesture. If they could not have it when they wanted it, they would not marry at all. Granny Forrester was certain that all sins were punished. She would be punished. God would kill her male grandchildren.
Her daughter, Lady St Clair, was permanently tired from worry. The moment she stopped worrying about one of the children she began to worry about another. It was all so silly as there was nothing she could do. Once they went away from home they were outside her protection. She prayed a lot but then she had prayed a lot for Richard and he had died from a fit.
And the food was running low. No milk or butter without the cows. They would buy some more cows if they had the money. Then she would learn to milk. Robert and Merlin were going to shoot as many hares and rabbits as possible. The weather was cold enough to let them hang for weeks without going too rotten. Somehow it would all be better after the war but she could not see how. The St Clairs were out of money before the war. Only Sir Willoughby Potts gave them an income. When he died his pension died with him. Not having money was the second worst thing in her life, after the war. She had no idea what she would have done without Merlin's fifty pounds. Maybe he would save their bacon if he wasn't killed in the war.
The idea of saving bacon made her smile the first time in weeks. The one thing they were not short of at Purbeck Manor was pigs… Her husband definitely had a way with pigs. She could not remember the last litter of fewer than fifteen piglets. And the one big sow dropped them every four weeks. Regular as clockwork… She would have to ask Robert to visit Mrs Pringle at the railway cottage. Edward, the seaman in the Pringle family, had gone down with his ship bringing munitions from America, sunk by what she heard they were calling U-boats. They had a new word for everything that was nasty. And there she was worrying again. That was three out of Mrs Pringle's children taken by this terrible war, she told herself. First, Walter who had come all the way from Australia to die. Now Edward. Worst of all, with her worrying, she could not for the life of her remember the name of the third boy who had died in France.
She had told Mrs Pringle in no uncertain terms to tell Albert to stay in South Africa. They never talked of Tina for fear of talking about something both of them would rather leave alone. In her plea to keep Albert safely in South Africa was the unspoken hope that Tina would stay there too. There could never be a marriage. Both understood. As a regular soldier, if he survived, a wife from Tina's class would have him thrown out of the regiment… And not a very good regiment either. To live in a top-class regiment, Barnaby would have needed money. A private income. No, Tina was out of the question. Barnaby had to stay in the army after the war to make his living… Why did it always come back to money? Then she began to worry about Barnaby in Palestine. The Turks killed Englishmen just as willingly as the Germans, even if they were not so efficient. For a moment, she thought of the Australians and New Zealanders that had died at Gallipoli.
Lady St Clair knew she was cursed with too vivid an imagination. Her husband could think about his pigs for hours on end without any intrusion into his mind. She wished she could do the same. No, she decided thinking back. She would have to ask old cook to learn how to milk a cow. Even in poverty there had to be appearances. It would never do for the lady of the Manor to become a milkmaid. The people in the village would think the whole country was going what they called broke. It had given them comfort for centuries to know the Lord was in his manor. When the Lord was strong, the people were safe. They might not like some of the rules but that was how it worked. In every society, someone had to give the people protection.
Turning her mind from the past to present, she hoped the boys would not mind eating pork for the next four days for supper. She doubted if Robert would notice. And Cook had made a plum pie for him, knowing it was his favourite. They had even added a little of the saved up sugar to make it an occasion. The fruit had been bottled when the Victoria plum trees were heavy with plums at the end of the summer. Before her youngest son went away to war.
And then she was worrying all over again, going round in a circle, starting at the beginning.
Merlin was woken that night in his room by the silence. Unbeknown to him, Robert was also awake in the next room, staring out of the open window into the winter night. They were both used to sleeping with horrendous noise. The wind shifted and Merlin listened more carefully. It was the guns. Someone was having a hate. Probably both sides. Merlin opened the window out far, making a noise.
"Can't sleep either," said Robert from the dark. There was only one wall between them and with their windows open they were able to whisper and hear each other. Neither wanted to wake anyone else in the family.
"Can you hear the guns?"
They both listened for a while in silence. There was no sound from the nearer blanket of silence. The guns were an overtone. From hell. Even at home, the war was in their bedrooms.
What sounded like a dog barking came from close to the hen run, followed by the squawking of the chickens. Used to putting boots on fast, they were out of the doors at the same moment, and running around the dark, familiar corridor, not caring if they woke the devil himself. Both had thrown overcoats over their pyjamas. Robert had his boyhood .410 shotgun in his hand, the nearest weapon he had found to snatch; Merlin was going to kick the fox to death if it did not run away. A box of cartridges banged in Robert's greatcoat pocket. Down the main stairs more by falling, turning in the dark to the kitchen by instinct, and out the back door, racing across the hoar frost grass, Robert put a cartridge into the single barrel of the gun, spurred on by the sound of mayhem coming from the hen run. There was something of a moon and th
e stars were bright, the hoar frost showing them a pale white layer on the ground. There were a fox and two vixens in the run. Dead chickens and feathers everywhere. Merlin got in one good blind kick and the predators was gone.
"You wouldn't have done that to a leopard," said Robert.
"We don't have leopards in England… What's the damage?"
"Looks worse than it is. My word. Poor mother would have had a heart attack if she had lost the chickens. That's what happens when the hunt is cancelled. You and I will wait up tomorrow with torches and twelve-bores. I find sleeping for long impossible. We can make ourselves a thermos flask of coffee. If we don't get that darn fox we'll get ourselves a rabbit. We used to do this often as kids. You remember? It's fun… Two of mother's chickens are dead. The rest have had their feathers ruffled… Now we really have woken up the family."
The electricity installed with old Potts's money was springing up all through the house, Lord St Clair was leaning out of his window in his nightshirt.
"What's going on?" he called.
"Foxes in the hen run," called back Merlin.
"Much damage?"
"Chicken for dinner tomorrow."
"Make a change," said Lord St Clair.
"We're going to wait up for them tomorrow."
"Good idea. Who's with you, Merlin?"
"Robert. We were at our bedroom windows listening to the guns."
"Just as well. I'm rather partial to an egg for my breakfast. Good night."
"Good night, father," they both called in unison.
Back in the house, with the chickens flopped onto the kitchen table, Robert poked up the fire in the Dover stove and waited for the big copper kettle to boil. Neither of them would be able to sleep. The tension of being out of the front line not facing the inevitable was worse than being in the trenches under bombardment. It was their only world. The foxes and the chickens would be gone like a puff of wind, like the whole of their leave. There was something about the inevitable for both of them that made the rest of life unimportant. There wasn't any point in anything when you were about to die. And there was nothing they could or wanted to do to stop it. Not to go back was unthinkable. The small portion of the rest of their lives was over there in the mud and cold, the noise and fear. They may be still alive but knew they had been sucked into eternity. The inevitability of their lives was right in front of them.