by Lorna Gray
I wondered where else I could put him if not in this room. I might have lately strayed across the boundary between housekeeper and bossy equal but I could hardly pass from there to the role of mother and dispatch the old man like a child to his bed. So I rambled brainlessly on the subject of the whereabouts of the lettuce, the challenge of slicing tomatoes and the delight of a modern gas oven – bottled gas, presumably? – and I was just beginning to really warm to the part of stand-in cook and company when he interrupted me. It came with a very small voice that swept away my worries about the impact of the housekeeper’s departure with such suddenness that I might as well have been fussing about the impact of a flea. He asked, in a whisper, if his son seemed damaged.
It was a frightened and frail plea. My hand hung over a partially chopped salad item of some sort while that same distant voice breathed, ‘I mean his mind after his injury. I thought the other boy was fine but—’
He meant his other son and the injury that had lamed him. This was where the desperation came from. The Colonel broke off with a little choke. Then the whisper added, ‘It’s very hard to be sure any more. Richard says he’s fine, but what does that prove? The other boy lied. We both lied when the blasted accident tore him apart. It ruined him and kept him from serving in the army and made him obsessive about his place here; and he hated it … and me. And Richard had to be his usual placid self throughout, even to the point of mediating later from his hospital bed. He got nerve damage, did you know? And a raging infection. Once that had gone I stayed in London because he hadn’t got the energy left to move and I had to practically force him to walk on it again and the other boy blamed me for that too. And now Richard’s come back here and I can’t tell any more what he’s thinking. He wasn’t supposed to come here today. It was supposed to just be me.’
He broke off again. The dread here was for himself and what he would learn about the condition of the surviving son’s mind. The expression on his face was a very peculiar mixture of impotence and desperate fright beneath an unattractive flush of drink. It made me wonder where his own lie had lain within John’s decline. And how much damage it must have done to his confidence that he couldn’t tell what his eldest son was capable of; or not capable of, as the case must really be.
It also made me aware, once again, of the unbending nature of the older son’s urge to protect. The Captain had known this trip might test his father’s fears and I had a horrible feeling that Richard’s decision to come here in person had been a careful balancing of the risks between leaving his father unsupported and adding to the old man’s dread of seeing another son flounder in this damaged place. It made my heart twist at the helplessness of it. And it wasn’t lost on me that his father wasn’t the only person who had taken to confronting the man today with questions about the innermost workings of his mind.
While my mouth worked silently in an attempt to find some form of reply, a sudden shifty look came over the Colonel’s face, as if he didn’t quite know what he had been saying but he was sure it wasn’t safe. The piece of bread caught his eye again and the simple act of eating seemed to bring him round. When he next spoke, his voice was considerably stronger. ‘Did Richard tell you what he does? What he did?’
‘A little,’ I replied, slightly clumsily.
‘You understand that Richard was a Lieutenant in his first command when they were first sent abroad? But promotion was rapid, yes? Whenever a senior officer was killed or injured his post had to be filled and quickly. But promotion wasn’t ratified. Not made official. My son served up to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in one of his commands but it couldn’t have stuck beyond the field of battle. It all had to be sorted out when they came home and everyone was given the real rank that was due to a man at his time in his career. I suppose you thought my son mustn’t have done very much to have come through all those years of fighting and still only be a Captain now?’
‘No! Of course not. I wouldn’t have thought about it like that at all.’
‘My son fought across North Africa in the 2nd Royal Gloucestershire Hussars. He was in the battle of Alam el Halfa.’ The Colonel’s voice grew grand with the precise elocution of one for whom pride lay in the details. I found that I had been fixed with a shrewd eye. He demanded suspiciously, ‘Does that mean anything to you? Desert. Filthy bloody desert and hundreds of tanks and aeroplanes; Germans, Italians and our men; all sweating it out because if we could stop them there, we could work them out of Africa.’
The old man had transformed. He actually revived enough to set his nearly emptied glass to one side, the better to make room for his hands which were sketching out an imaginary plan of North Africa upon the tabletop. I stared as a crooked finger swept a line from a knot towards an ancient scorch mark. ‘Rommel came from here, meaning to take our man Montgomery here. You understand me? From the southwest.’ I nodded because I was supposed to. This was not, I suspected, destined to be a conversation that I could meet with equal knowledge but, to be quite frank, I was willing to indulge the old man in any subject he chose just so long as it curbed the desperate bleakness that had seemed only too devastating only a few minutes before. And this man really loved his war.
A finger was sketching a curve. ‘Rommel wanted to encircle us like he’d done before and give us a sound thrashing before pushing us back into the sea. But he was funnelled north. Mines did that. And my son was here.’ A swift glance at my face to confirm that I was following the lecture. ‘He spent six days on the ridge pounding away with guns smaller than the enemy’s while old Monty held the line firm and brought in aeroplanes to finish it. Monty was the man to see the job through. He knew what blood must be shed, what lives must be spent—’
I must have made a sound. I hadn’t meant to. Sharp eyes found my face. Then he assured me kindly, ‘It was all about the strategy, you see. It always is. You public, you see it like a scene on a newsreel; flickering footage of tragedy and heroes and grinning men coated in grit and filth. But Monty – and me in my time – we old campaigners perceive our cause differently. Home counts, the lives of our men count and, of course, victory counts, but at that moment – at that instant of knowing you’ve seen your opponent’s move perfectly – you know you’ve got the chance to take them and then you don’t need any other cause at all.’
As he spoke I couldn’t help seeing the Captain as I had met him only this morning, but this time clad in sand-coloured uniform, hunkered down in the cramped airlessness of one of many tanks, working with desperation, elation and sheer strength of will to keep his men feeding that beast of a machine. Doing it knowing that the deaths of a few thousand soldiers were being coolly measured against other losses; and that by his own actions as a lesser commander of men, he was endorsing it.
I couldn’t help wondering what the Captain’s cause was. And doubted it would quite be the same.
The Colonel had moved on. His energy was running on now to an earnest tale of someone, something, who had been broken up. In a way his enthusiasm was infectious.
‘You mean Rommel?’ I had a feeling I hadn’t got that right. It turned out I was correct there.
‘No!’ The Colonel was impatient when his pupil missed an important point. His head turned to follow me as I moved to the dresser in the far corner. The dresser stood with its back to the garden beside a long blank wall of panelled wood that ran back to frame the door into the dining room. A neatly folded pile of napkins waited there with the crockery.
The Colonel raised his voice to cover the increase of distance – which was, in fact, only a matter of two or three yards. He told me, ‘I’m talking about the 2nd Royal Gloucestershire Hussars – Richard’s regiment. It was disbanded. Broken up. Dispersed to other fighting units. They’d already suffered a long line of heavy losses in the run up to that battle and it had to be their last. They went into the 4th, the 8th …’ He reeled off a list of numbers that might have been armies, regiments or anything, for all I knew.
‘But not,’ he added, ‘Richard.
He came home and then he—’
Then a loud exclamation that made me spin of, ‘Richard!’
The kitchen door had opened. The Colonel said, beaming to the silhouette who still stood there with his hand on the newly opened door, ‘I’ve just been regaling Miss, um, Whateverhernameis with the account of your adventures at Alam el Halfa.’
There really was pride in the old man’s voice. His son was calm in reply. ‘Miss Sutton. And I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear about that.’
He stepped into the room. His voice was for his father, but his eyes found me in my corner and there was an undertone because he thought he knew what I would be thinking and he had mastery enough of himself now to be amused by it; only in truth, he didn’t know at all. He didn’t know that the vivid account his father had just given of the foreign battle and its horrific toll upon endurance was merging now with this image of a man who was here; alive. His body burned with the pure enjoyment of exercise. This was why he’d wanted to walk. His collar had been loosened and a faint sheen touched the base of his throat. It was an uninhibited reintroduction to the real man and it wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t have to feel like this. With my preconceptions about peacefulness and all this talk about war and soldiering that must be perfectly pitched to challenge me, it wasn’t right that I should have to find a military man so appallingly attractive. But he was. He gave off this sheer human vitality and he was intelligent and kind, and he’d shaken me today with every fresh proof of it. And now he’d walked in like this in the midst of a very peculiar evening and the relief of having him here made my mind ache.
The awful thing was that I saw the split second pass while he searched my face for the expected criticism and found there something else entirely. The dresser clattered beside me as a distraction when I accidentally knocked it. I saw doubt spread like ink into the easy humour that had come in warm with his walk. I found that my mouth was mirroring the way his lips had parted in mild sort of query and instantly clamped mine firmly shut. It was idiotic and I couldn’t help stiffly bustling across the room in an attempt to hide the flush that scorched my face by scurrying to the table with my napkins. But then his head turned and his gaze dropped to the old man in the chair beside him and he found the wrong interpretation for my embarrassment in the similar colour that was flooding his father’s cheeks.
I believe I would have given anything to have kept him from learning why I had coaxed the Colonel into sitting with me. Now cold swept across my skin as I saw the Captain’s swift intelligence take in the napkins in my hands and the brandy bottle and the evidence of my effort to soak it up with buttered bread and I saw at last the depth of the care between this father and his son. As Richard gazed down at his father’s blurred features, there was, in the set of his jaw, tender understanding and an almost fierce absence of blame. This scene wasn’t, I noticed, a surprise to him. But it certainly gave the Captain a hard sense of failure. And at the same time I also saw in his final, swift assessing glance to me beneath lowered brows a difficulty that might easily shift into shame, only I knew that he mustn’t be allowed to feel that, not for me.
How could I possibly explain that I too could appreciate that it took a complicated, damaged man like his father to possess the kind of drive needed to push an exhausted son to recovery. Master John had struggled against the old man and I doubted that the Colonel had ever displayed much of a bedside manner, but this son’s living, vibrant presence now was a mark of his father’s capacity for love all the same.
I couldn’t explain something like that, of course. So instead I said, with unnecessary passion, ‘You needn’t have ransacked Phyllis’s vegetable garden after all. You and Colonel Langton have very caring neighbours. Are you ready to eat? Mrs Winstone’s pie is hot, I think.’
I emptied my hands of napkins upon the tabletop and found that he was holding out my cousin’s key, dangling at the end of its short chain. I obediently put out my hand and he dropped the key into my palm. Now it was my turn to be puzzled by the change in his expression. I’d caused it with my silly formal use of his father’s title by way of denoting respect, and his doubt made me doubtful. I dealt with it in the only way I knew, which was to play the part of temporary housekeeper even more thoroughly than before. I went to the oven and made as much womanly clattering as I could while I extracted the pie from its depths.
I straightened and set the weighty dish upon the hob. It was hot in here all of a sudden and I had to sweep the hair back from my face with the back of a hand. The Captain hadn’t yet taken his seat. I set a handful of cutlery down on the countertop for him and as I did so I gave him a truly reassuring smile. None of this needed to be difficult. I saw the surprise as my wide beam hit him and the release as he decided to accept his part in this scene. I saw him approach and collect the pieces I’d left in a stack for him. And then the jug and glasses for water. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him draw out a chair and claim it, before setting a glass down beside his place and another one for his father. There was caution in the act as though it might have been natural enough for the Captain to manage his own meals in his London home, but here tradition had always been maintained to the point of obsession. I thought he was finding it mildly disorientating to see his father taking his ease like this.
I served the pie onto two plates and set them down before the men. The Colonel approached his with boyish enthusiasm and after a moment or two more the son shrugged and lifted his fork and deliberately turned his mind to conversation that would please his father. He began by describing some improvement he’d observed on our drive about the boundary of the estate.
I took the chance to remind them of my telephone call and retreated through the passage into the house. As the Captain’s gaze followed me it carried a faint question again, but he didn’t act except to give a brief nod to confirm my choice was fine. But I didn’t mean to use the telephone anyway. I did the only thing I thought I could do to keep from damaging the Colonel’s restored mood by either forcing them into an evening of stilted conversation with an unexpected guest or, as was more likely, embarrassing us all by scuttling about after more chores like a crawling, lovesick busybody who was desperate to insinuate her way into every aspect of their life at the Manor.
I let myself quietly out of the front door and along the drive onto the lane, and then I followed it quickly down the hill.
Chapter 13
My reward for abandoning my only chance of company was a sleepless night stalked by a belief that the house was being watched and a persistent smell of burning. I stumbled downstairs sometime after one in the morning in the way a woman does when she can’t tell if she is still dreaming and found a knot of matter that had smouldered for a while on the kitchen floor. The smell of smoke curled in the air beneath the narrow line of the open window. It was too small a gap for anyone to have got in from outside and, besides, the bold starlit night showed there really was no one out there. And also, just to firmly scotch my half-dreaming worries once and for all, my cousin’s frustratingly difficult stove was the obvious culprit anyway.
Stumbling back to bed revived another worry though. I knew I wasn’t supposed to disbelieve him any more when he said he knew I was an innocent party here, but I discovered a different interpretation for the Captain’s unspoken query at dinnertime. The hint came in the form of the letter that lay on top of the cupboard just inside my bedroom door. It was my cousin’s letter – the one that gave directions to her house – and instead of being in my suitcase ready to give that strange, balding, house-invading man a good cause for coming straight to my garden gate, it had been lying here all along with the book that I’d forgotten to pack that morning. It raised the question of how that man had found me at all. And worse still, I knew that if Captain Richard Langton had happened to be puzzling over that same point himself and had thought to use his mission to collect my cousin’s vegetables as an opportunity to undertake an illicit bit of snooping, in this letter he must have found just the sort of eviden
ce he might have been looking for.
All in all, I was glad when morning came and I could take out my cousin’s bicycle and make one last effort to reach her on the telephone.
The paths and trackways from the cottage door were busy today with hurrying farmhands trotting down one hillside and puffing up the other on their way to another day at the hay cut. At home in Putney the streets would have been busy with women making their purchases, going to their stations in the typing pool, women hurrying to the laundry lady to sigh over the restrictions on soap or to the butchers because word had got out that he’d received a delivery of offal. Here the traffic was entirely populated by tanned males and there was also a man who appeared to be destined for a more leisurely day, who was forging a path against the flow in ordinary clothes – and by that I mean trousers and a summer jacket rather than the rough shirt and brown trousers that made up the countryman’s uniform. It wasn’t the same summer jacket that had been worn by the man on Mr Winstone’s path and this man’s hair was fair rather than dark. After him I met Danny Hannis and his dog at the ford.
‘Hullo,’ I said politely. ‘Are you here for me?’
He was. He had, of all things, my cousin’s torch in his hands. He handed it to me and waited while I went through the tediously long task of letting myself back into the house, returned the torch to its home and then locked up again. He had hold of my bicycle now and seemed to be preparing to push the heavy frame for me up the steep hill. It must be said that I wasn’t inclined to complain.