by John Masters
‘Very good, sir.’
Have to make it a night soon, and toddle home to his bungalow, and bed. Daphne would hear from Gail Courtney that there hadn’t been a big bash at the guest night and want to know why he hadn’t come home sooner; but sufficient unto the day …
The whisky came and he drank, staring into the empty fireplace, ringed by the angled, padded bench. They were making a row in the city, and there must be a breeze coming this way, for he could hear the throbbing of drums … bloody Wogs.
He was an officer and a gentleman, at last. A sahib. Member of the upper classes. The baby, whatever it turned out to be, would be accepted as pukka, go to the right sort of school, and have a natural la-di-da accent. And it would be heir to the British Empire … which was disintegrating. Christ, how he’d worked for this … risked his life, lost his old friends, learned all the proper things to do, to say … shoot snipe, drink chhota pegs, wear tweeds … and now the whole bloody caboodle was slowly falling to pieces before his eyes.
‘Waiter!’ he called. ‘Another bara peg!’
Quentin Rowland lay in bed beside his wife Fiona, under the oil nude of her on the putting green, late summer light streaming impudently over her pale skin and the golden triangle at her loins, a half-smile on her parted lips. On the opposite wall there were two smaller oils, of men – himself to the right, Archie Campbell to the left; both in steel helmets, in dug-out or trench, in cold weather, snow mantling the earth behind. All three paintings were Archie’s, as were all the drawings and paintings in the drawing-room and along the passages of the sprawling bungalow.
Fiona said, ‘Matra Singh wants to paint me. He is very talented.’
‘Not a nude!’ Quentin said quickly. That would be too much.
‘I don’t think so,’ Fiona said. ‘Though it wouldn’t matter. He’s very modern, and his style’s rather like Modigliani’s, only still more elongated. I don’t think anyone would recognise me.’
‘Not a nude,’ Quentin repeated. He was secretly proud of the nude over the bed, and of Fiona, for not caring what anyone thought. But Archie had painted it: he didn’t want any more, by any other hands.
She said, ‘What do you think of Guy’s Foundation? The C & M ’s had a lot about it.’
He said, ‘I’m sorry that he’s not going to stay in the RAF. There’s no limit to how far he might have gone. But … it needed doing. Not by the Government, but by the people who came through whole, for those who didn’t. We should be proud of him.’
‘I am,’ Fiona said. ‘And even of Virginia and her Sergeant-Major, in a way. She did what she wanted to do, not what we wanted her to.’
Nothing had worked out as he had expected, Quentin thought. Guy, he’d always thought, would design aircraft and play cricket for Kent, and probably England. Virginia would marry some nice subaltern in the Buffs, move to Canterbury, and live happily ever after. But Guy was the one-time Butcher of the air, a knight, a hero, and now a healer; and Virginia the fat, happy wife of a crippled Battery Sergeant-Major, self-equipped with a Yorkshire accent to match his.
Fiona’s hand crept out and moved down his chest and belly. Archie was watching, a weary half-smile on his haggard face, under the dull bowl of his steel helmet. Fiona knew he was watching … The two men over there on the wall were the other points of the triangle, anchored in the nude over the bed, legs a little spread. It was a firm triangle, full now of love and understanding. Quentin turned on his side and began to caress his wife’s breast, leaning down to kiss her on her parted lips.
Daily Telegraph, Thursday, November 20, 1919
AMERICAN SENATE AND THE PEACE TREATY
MR LODGE OUTVOTED
New York, Wednesday.
The Lodge resolution for ratification with the reservations has been defeated, receiving only 55 votes for to 39 against. It thus lacked the necessary two-thirds majority. A resolution by Senator Reed to reconsider the motion was carried by 62 to 30, and another by Senator Hitchcock to ratify the Treaty without reservations was declared out of order by 50 to 43 – Exchange Telegraph Company.
PRESIDENT’S LETTER
The letter of President Wilson to Senator Hitchcock, which was read this morning at a conference of Democratic Senators called to decide the Administration’s final course of ratification, is expected to line up the Democratic Senators almost solidly against the Republican proposals for ratification. The letter advises the Senators to vote against the ratification of the Peace Treaty with the Foreign Relations Committee’s reservations, and declares that the Committee’s programme provides not for ratification but ‘rather for nullification of the Treaty’. The President said: ‘I understand the door will then probably be open for a genuine resolution of ratification. I trust all true friends of the Treaty will refuse to support Senator Lodge’s resolution.’
Cate looked up – ‘It looks as though the Peace Treaty is in trouble in the American Senate.’
Isabel said, ‘It is. The Republicans are offering all sorts of reservations, but really they want to torpedo it altogether. No foreign entanglements, they say, and the League of Nations would put our finger in every pie, all over the world. Mr Wilson’s not going to be able to get it passed … even if he was fit, and he’s anything but … Do you realise that we’ll be seeing Stella and John again inside a couple of months?’
‘Yes,’ Cate said. ‘And I can hardly sleep wondering what she’ll be like … whether John’s hopes and plans for curing her have come to anything.’
‘We’ll see for ourselves,’ she said. She turned to another page of her paper and after a moment said, ‘Guy must be working himself to death with that Foundation of his. There’s something about it in the Telegraph nearly every day … and much more in the Hedlington Courier, of course. What can we do for him?’ Isabel asked. ‘Thank you, Garrod, that’s enough.’
The maid went out. Cate said, ‘I wonder if any of them could work in the barns or fields … But if they could, the Foundation wouldn’t take them. Guy can’t help the fit as well as the sick.’
She said, ‘I was thinking that perhaps we could give them a day in the country. Suppose you had a charabanc load down … it’s very close, after all – one day a week during summer. Just let them walk or sit in the fields, hear the blackbirds.’
‘I’ll talk to Guy about it,’ Cate said. ‘If he has a moment to spare.’
Chapter 32
England, Arizona: November, 1919
Stephen Merritt, sitting in the big bow window of the living-room, looking out across the grey, choppy waters of Tappan Zee, wondered what had happened to fragment his family so violently. Before the war he had always envisaged John working in Fairfax, Gottlieb with him, marrying, buying a house on the river – over there in Tarrytown, perhaps … Betty marrying too, of course, some nice young fellow she’d meet here, and probably living in New York at first … Isabel would have remarried, perhaps Peter Van Dehofer down in Grandview, and they’d all be here, close but not too close, a family … But Betty had married an English poet, Johnny had gone off to the most desolate parts of Arizona, and Isabel, too, had married an Englishman.
He’d have to go over there himself to see what was happening at JMC and HAC. The board had discussed the situation last week – they had a considerable investment in the two firms, which had done well so far; but matters could not be left as they were. It was hard to understand, from here, why some compromise could not be reached. So he’d have to go and see for himself; and while he was over there he’d see Betty and her husband and at least get a better picture than he had now of the kind of life they were living. In its way it was as hard to imagine as was John’s and Stella’s, out on the Navajo Reservation.
Tomorrow he’d send Betty a cable; right now he’d book his passage.
‘My father’s coming over,’ Betty said, putting down the cable form. ‘He’ll be here on the 30th.’
‘Ah, but where will we be?’ Fletcher said. ‘London? Paris? Edinburgh? Dublin?’
&nb
sp; ‘We’re staying in Oxford till the 25th,’ she said. ‘Then we go back to Hedlington for a bit … Your hand’s trembling, Fletcher, and your eyes are bloodshot.’
Fletcher said, ‘I have a hangover, woman. What do you expect, if we sit up all night drinking brandy with the likes of Robert Graves and John Masefield and Edmund Blunden? Those folk have harder heads than you’d ever expect, hearing them talk … Let’s go over to the Boar and have a hair of the dog.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said. ‘And then to a pub at the end of town, not the Boar. It’ll blow the cobwebs out of our heads.’
He got up without a word and followed her down the stairs of the little hotel where they were living, and into the street. Betty loved Oxford. The Rowlands had all gone to Cambridge – she remembered talking to Naomi about it – but for herself she couldn’t imagine anything better than Oxford. Who called it the City of Dreaming Spires? A bit over-romantic, especially now that it was bursting with young men back from the war, their faces etched with what they had seen; and though they were surprisingly gentle in voice and manner, they were not innocent, and never would be again.
Fletcher said, ‘Edmund said my poetry was stronger than his, because I’d been an Other Rank. He was an officer in the Royal Sussex … I think he’s right. Good officers was in just as much danger as the men – more, mostly – and had it just as hard … but they weren’t of us. Couldn’t be, because they had to give the orders. That’s why Rosenberg and me are the best. I’d like to have met Rosenberg … funny to think of a cockney Jew-boy writing great poetry about ordinary Englishmen at war.’
She said, ‘Siegfried Sassoon was very flattering, again, when he came to tea.’
Fletcher nodded – ‘Aye, he was.’
‘And you haven’t written anything for three months, and that wasn’t very good – you said so yourself.’
‘We’ve been travelling too much,’ he said. ‘And learning. Why, I’ve been seeing so much my head’s crammed with it all … aero-engine factories, cotton mills, trawlers, banks, libraries, painters’ studios, doctors’ operating rooms … It’s a wonder I’ve not gone dotty.’
After a time, walking into the brisk cold wind, she said, ‘We’ve done enough of that. You’ve seen that there are other ways of life than yours, as it used to be … You’ve made some connection between the men you only knew as soldiers and their real lives. It’s time we settled down and you started to write poetry. And it’s time you heard some criticism, not all flattery.’
‘Why, woman,’ he protested, ‘what’s wrong with having someone like my poems? It’s better than having Mr Bridges and the rest of them say they’re trash, only fit for the dustbin, isn’t it, now?’
She said, ‘Yes, but you’ve been living on a diet of undiluted flattery ever since you came out of the army. It’s a drug, just as strong as the heroin Stella was taking … I suppose she still is. Flattery’s more subtle, that’s all. After a time, you become dependent on it. You feel hurt – pain – if you don’t get it. And your mind is affected, in that you lose your powers of judgement.’
‘Aiih, sounds terrible,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll be glad to settle down, and you’ll give me all the hard words I need, won’t you, love?’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘Now, where are we going to live? Where are we going to put down our roots? A poet needs roots.’
‘I found that out these past months,’ Fletcher said. ‘Hey, look, there’s Robert Graves. He can come and walk with us and …’
She said, ‘He hasn’t seen us. Don’t bother him … we have things to talk about between ourselves. Every time you meet another poet … or anyone who recognises you … it becomes a party, drinking, congratulating each other on what jolly good fellows you are … We were asking, where shall we live? You were saying, you found out that you have to have roots.’
Fletcher nodded, ‘Yes. While I was at the war I thought I was writing poetry about it, the war … but I wasn’t. I was writing about my own people, and we had our roots right there, all of us did, in that mud and blood and dirt and mess. Then … it was good living in Granddad’s cottage, but when he and his Woman had to move back, it was too bloody crowded in there, so we’ve been living in hotels, and trains, and more hotels, and more trains, and …’
‘What about getting a house in Hedlington, and making that our home?’ she interrupted.
He said, ‘’Tis too much of a town, love. We’d meet people when we went out, ’stead of badgers or kestrels. We’d walk pavements instead of fields … and the Scarrow’s too dirty to swim in, or fish in, in Hedlington.’
She said, ‘We could probably get the Cottage, at Beighton. The people who bought it from John are not happy there, Aunt Susan told me. We’d have to modernise it.’
‘Why? We can manage with old-fashioned things, the way I always have.’
She said, ‘No, Fletcher. You must concentrate on writing, not on mending the thatch, pumping water, carrying coal, cutting grass. And I may not be there all the time.’
She let that sink in; but Fletcher did not seem to have been taken aback. He said, ‘Why not, love? Where are you going?’
‘I want to go back to work at HAC,’ she said. ‘I was very happy there. I was doing work that I was capable of, that I had the training for … and in the last two years I learned a great deal about aircraft design.’
‘I can fend for myself,’ Fletcher said.
‘Oh darling, it’s more than that,’ she cried. ‘I don’t think you are really at ease, being looked after – having a woman at your personal beck and call. It’s beginning to stifle you, and perhaps that’s why you haven’t written any poetry, rather than all the travelling and learning. I’ll come home every evening, of course.’
‘I’ll make your breakfast,’ he said. ‘I’ll be up by then.’
That was true, she knew; for he always got up early. It was old Probyn’s teaching. To Fletcher the hours between four and dawn were the best of the day. That was why some of the parties in London and here in Oxford – indeed, wherever he had gone to learn, and to be lionised – had taken a severe toll of him; for he had still got up at four, after going to bed at three, or not at all.
She said, ‘I’ll have to see if they’ll take me back … The last I heard they’re still on strike and I don’t know whether they have my old job for me, or need me at all. But that’s it – the Weald of Kent is your home and I will be happy to make it mine. Your work will be poetry, mine will be making aeroplanes … and we’ll share love.’
‘When will we have babies?’ Fletcher said.
She did not speak for a long time, then – ‘Here’s the Green Man, Fletcher. It looks like a nice little pub, and we’ve earned our beers now.’
‘That we have,’ he said, turning into the neat little pub beside the Isis. ‘But what about babies?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Give me a little more time, Fletcher. To know that I really want them … that I’m fit to be a mother, in this country, this century, this time.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said.
John Merritt, perched on a stepladder arranging saddles and harness for sale on the side wall of the Trading Post, took the telegraph slip from the Navajo’s hand and read it, holding the paper sideways to the light. It was from his father and read: Sailing England Tuesday plan to return before end of year if possible hope to visit you January as must go San Francisco on bank business that month.
John put the slip in his pocket and continued his work. It would be great if Dad could come and see them at home in the Trading Post. It was a far cry from River House in Nyack – farther still from Walstone Manor; but it was their home; and, for him, it felt like their first, and perhaps their last, for they had both settled in here in a way neither had experienced before. Stella was working on a loom at the end of the room now, with Mary Begay squatting beside her, occasionally moving the yarn for her. Her colours were well-chosen, though the lines were not straight and the patterns uninteresting. She was learni
ng the craft, because it represented an important part of all Navajo women’s lives, and nowadays, an important part of the total income of the Dinneh, the People, as the Navajo called themselves. A Navajo woman had to make saddle blankets for her husband’s horse gear, other blankets to keep him warm, moccasins for his feet. She, and to some some extent the whole family, were judged by the excellence of the work – and slowly the blankets or rugs with the traditional designs, Two Grey Hills, Crystal, Chinle, Rainbow Man, were becoming known to Eastern tourists. Stella, if she was to get a fair price for them, must know which were good and which were bad; the Navajo would not respect her if she did not, and she would find herself losing not only the tourists’ custom, but the Navajos’ willingness to sell through her.
Outside it was a dark day of clouds, cold in the wind. The snow would come soon, John thought. Then business would die down, for then the Indians could not come to the Trading Post except in emergency, or if there was a break in the weather and the snow was not lying too deep. Then they’d come out of boredom, Reinhart assured him, to drink coffee (at his expense if they could manoeuvre it), meet each other, finger the goods, recognise the rings and turquoise brooches they themselves had made, now displayed under glass, and their wives’ rugs, hanging on the wall … but buying nothing. And, of course, there would be no tourists.
He glanced down and saw that a Navajo was standing at the counter, alone, leaning on it. He might have been there ten minutes, but had said nothing. He was a fat man, fortyish, powerful, wearing a tall domed black hat with a beaded band, and a heavy concho belt. John called down, ‘Do you want me?’
‘Perhaps,’ the man said, in Navajo.
John climbed down. He greeted the Indian ceremonially. The man returned the greeting. They discussed the weather – Yes, it might snow before the week was out. Last year it had snowed at this season, but not much. John thought the man was expecting to be offered a cup of coffee, but he would not do so. After a quarter of an hour the man said, ‘Benally Bekis – ’ (that meant Benally’s Friend, the name by which he had been known ever since he came to the reservation, and the Dinneh had heard, all at once, without words, of his connection with Chee Shush) … ‘I want to pawn this belt.’