by Lorna Gray
But the garden wasn’t actually the victim of my greed or Richard’s pillaging expedition. We’d been hit by the vegetable thief. And that wasn’t the only jolt that waited for me there, nor was it the last addition to the long list of reasons why I should be feeling so glad we’d decided she and I wouldn’t be spending tonight at the cottage. The real concern was that the steady and wearying fussing from my usually indomitable cousin didn’t stop at the garden. It followed us over the threshold and up the stairs. Then she opened the door to the bedroom that had formerly been her mother’s, and my concern bloomed into full-blown alarm.
I had never really thought before to notice how strange it was that while my recently deceased aunt had given over so much space in her house to treasures and relics from the past, she hadn’t seen fit to also make room for family photographs. As it turned out, she hadn’t needed to make space for them. Because they were all amassed in her bedroom. People and faces crowded about on every wall and surface, watching and judging every move.
Phyllis seemed oblivious. She was rummaging in drawers supervised by sixty or so ancestors who glowered stiffly beneath Victorian headgear in artful soft focus. It was probable that my aunt had enjoyed the company of these men and women in the same way that she had collected oriental vases, but for Phyllis I thought it a dangerous shrine to time. It made me afraid that a part of Phyllis – the part of her that was a single woman of an age where she already felt it necessary to dub a man ‘young’ just so that she could secretly like him – was only waiting for the time to come when a stereotype of age and spinsterhood could truly be assumed as her identity and she could begin to add her own collection to the rooms of this house. She was trying it on for size now in this bedroom and I thought vehemently that she shouldn’t be because she had always been my inspiring heroine and age had no business defining any woman, unmarried or not; but now I saw she had already added the portraits of her wartime friends to this company of bygone faces and I wondered what had happened to her. And how much it had to do with Danny.
On that basis it was hardly surprising that I practically galloped her through the process of selecting clothes and hurried away with her case down the stairs and back to the glorious, vibrant present. Richard had left us in peace and I found him outside by his car, where the late afternoon shadow was creeping down from the high valley ridge. He lifted his head as I tripped carelessly out of the garden gate. He rose from his lean against his car and turned to meet me. He was looking relaxed in that way people have when the warmth in every memory passes electrifyingly across the space between you, and yet from the expression of his mouth no one would think anything had changed. It was the first time I’d had the chance to look at him properly since he had returned after collecting his car. I faltered with a hand on the scorching metal bonnet and murmured something nonsensical. His reply was similarly ordinary. For the moment nothing else needed to be said.
Then Phyllis crashed out of her house, looking for all the world like a thirty-year-old playing a mad old hermit delivering curses and I hurried away to wrestle with the heavy bolts on her door. It was quite laughable, really, that when we finally left the insanity of her house and arrived at that great cavernous mausoleum, the Manor, I found it to be the gloriously living embodiment of homely comfort.
The Colonel was glowing pink and thoroughly at his ease at the kitchen table and chatting with Mr and Mrs Winstone over a small brandy and apparently delighted to be told he had two guests for the night, particularly when I was able to take over Mrs Winstone’s role of rattling about in his oven. She passed over command to me like it was the changing of the guard and when she bustled her husband into his coat and away some fifteen minutes later I learned that the feeling was true in more ways than one. The salute and witticism Mr Winstone sketched at the kitchen door as he left proved that he had previously served in the military as the Colonel’s driver and it was the Colonel who had retained him afterwards and brought him into the sphere of the woman who became his wife. And also into the part of stepfather to that woman’s boy.
Richard had long since taken himself quietly off on an errand into the Colonel’s library, but the old man was telling Phyllis that she must remember how wayward young Danny had been in those early days, since she must have been cast as his nursemaid and given the responsibility of pulling him out of trouble. ‘And Richard too, as I recall.’ The Colonel said it quite proudly.
‘Yes,’ agreed Phyllis sharply while she adjusted her choice of chair at the kitchen table and selected another as a stool for her swollen foot. ‘And they weren’t terribly polite about it either. They always managed to make me feel that the two years’ advantage I had on them put me in the category of being as old as the hills.’
Richard had reappeared in the kitchen doorway in time to catch his father’s laugh. The brief sound came out brashly, as if the old man wasn’t quite sure mirth was something he was putting in its right place. I thought this was the release of having done his duty by speaking to his tenants.
His son was saying mildly, ‘I hope at least we’ve learned better manners now?’
It wasn’t the most tactful of things to say when he ought to have been making some comment about the insignificance of the gap between their ages these days. Particularly when I turned from one counter to the next in time to catch the movement on Phyllis’s face as she noticed that Danny had just passed along the tip of the garden terrace with his dog on his heels, without, it must be said, once sparing a glance for the house. She’d seen him through the window that was set into the wall beside that large dresser. I thought Danny’s manner implied an unwillingness to be trapped in conversation. The Colonel thought it stemmed from the urgency of feeding the goat.
The old man turned to me and asked quite severely, ‘Have you spoken to the butcher yet?’
It was a demonstration of his best strident tone – strong and dictatorial – and not a tone he had ever needed to use on me before. The roughness of it completely robbed me of an easy reply. I was just beginning to frame a clumsy excuse when Richard answered for me more smoothly. ‘Of course she hasn’t. She’s been dancing about at my beck and call all day. I’ll speak to the man myself tomorrow. How was your day, Father?’
It was a perfectly pleasant question but, instead of replying, the Colonel’s eyes strayed next to the brandy bottle on the table. I believed for a moment it was a guilty confession that he had spent his afternoon retreating into companionable drunkenness with his old driver after the hard work of speaking to his tenants. But it couldn’t have been because he wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t even close to being drunk. And he didn’t look shrunken today or beaten. In this bright warm room, the old white-haired man looked just as he had when I’d left him in the sunshine that morning, and perhaps how he had hoped to be last night, only the drink had robbed him of his control. He looked now fully in command. And because of it, gave me the novel experience of thinking that this sudden loss of concentration and his earlier laughter might both be another masquerade.
Then I realised I was worrying about the wrong person. The Colonel swept this particular concern away as nonsense when he began telling Phyllis something else about Danny Hannis. He spoke smoothly and calmly and he continued telling her about it while Richard left the room again on some other duty. The Colonel told her about his patronage during the war to ensure Danny’s lowly status as a farmhand hadn’t sentenced him to the wastefulness of life as a swell-the-ranks kind of soldier. I had a feeling she already knew all this and didn’t want to hear it now. I saw her reach for the brandy bottle, only to abandon the effort when it was just too far.
Richard hadn’t left us after all. He moved quietly into the room for the sake of reaching a few more glasses down from the dresser that stood in the corner – beside the blank panels that I now knew concealed the servants’ door – and poured into each a small measure of something more appropriate than brandy to serve as an aperitif. He set the bottle down and slid a glass across the count
er to me, then one to Phyllis and, finally, after the briefest of hesitations, another towards his father. He carried his own back to the dresser and rested there.
Instead of conveying thanks, Phyllis twisted awkwardly in her seat to deliver an absurdly forthright beam and to observe, ‘When I last saw you, Captain, you were a fresh-faced youth in your first officer’s uniform. I wasn’t yet established here when you came back briefly in the spring, so I didn’t see you then. I was still wading about in flood water in Gloucester.’
I saw her falter as her reference to her unhappy hospital vigil over her dying mother strayed into an accidental reference to the incident behind Richard’s own abrupt return home at that time. We all knew John shouldn’t be mentioned here before the Colonel. And I was unhappily certain that the urgency that had driven Richard’s desperate race across country to this beleaguered house must have stemmed from a stark idea of rescue far beyond the vital care that belonged to a parent grieving for the loss of a son. I’d seen a glimpse of its legacy last night in Richard’s eyes when he’d had the surprise of finding his father in this kitchen with me.
I didn’t know whether my cousin knew that part too but I certainly thought her slip had irritated her. She lurched into saying something else that was just as badly placed. And this time it was rather more deliberate. She remarked with an acidic edge to Richard, ‘You were so optimistic when you first took your uniform. I’ve wondered since how it is that you should know now what soldiering is, and yet you continue to make it your career.’
‘Phyllis!’ The exclamation came out of me uncontrollably. I knew what she was doing. My role-model had re-emerged, and with a vengeance. She’d noticed the quiet sympathy between us. She couldn’t help but notice, if Danny’s opinion of my capacity for disguise was anything to go by. And on that score, I knew she had been made uncomfortable by the Colonel’s insistence on talking about Danny and I thought this was her deflection of it. So, while I accepted that she believed she was acting here as a kind of spokesperson for my welfare, I was wishing passionately that she wouldn’t do it in this state of mind. Particularly not when she was trespassing so horribly close on doubts I had similarly expressed myself and not yet had the chance to soften.
Richard, at least, was undisturbed. He was leaning against the robust prop of the kitchen dresser with his arms lightly folded and the glass shining in his hand. His clothing had relaxed a little since his formal appearance in Gloucester; that is to say the jacket had been shed and the rest had eased a little at the neck, so that I was half expecting to learn that he had lately taken himself off for another strenuous walk. He asked Phyllis, ‘Is that a serious question?’
‘It might be. The gruelling years behind us would be enough to put anyone off. And you were shot.’
‘After I came home.’
‘How?’ Quickfire, her question was tart.
An eyebrow quirked. ‘Oh, didn’t you know? You’re not supposed to ask. No soldier wants to talk about the past any more, least of all a brush with death. We’re trying to put the war behind us.’
‘And yet, unlike all the conscripts who really are home for good, you aren’t putting it behind you, are you? You continue to choose to do it.’
I’ve never known jealousy before. There was something in her slanting looks and Richard’s steadiness that shamed me. Whereas I’d forgotten that for the Colonel, the subject of war was one of his most comfortable topics. He was lounging in his creaking wooden chair with his hand out upon the tabletop, idly toying with his sherry glass. Heavy white eyebrows twitched above sharp eyes as he roused himself to say grandly, ‘Of course Richard has stayed in the army. My son fought in the vital conflict of North Africa. He was part of the force that ultimately gave us the chance to turn the Axis out of the entire continent. His courage there was what got him his post as Captain when he came home again. He was mentioned in dispatches. And now he’s practically Whitehall’s right-hand man.’
The Colonel was actually happy. He really believed in the doctrine of war as a force for salvation, but I wasn’t quite sure Richard liked being cast as the hero of the day. The son really was being honest when he said he didn’t want to revisit his part in the war and, really, I thought I oughtn’t to be the only person in this room capable of guessing why. Richard’s experiences had been such that nearly two years after he’d come home, he’d still been so utterly exhausted by it all that when he’d been abruptly consigned to hospital by a violent scene on a London street, he’d found that he hadn’t the reserves left to fight for recovery.
That time, his father had pushed him through it with his bullying support. Now, roughly another year on, I thought things must be generally better. But still it was no wonder to me that Richard didn’t want to talk about his past duties or hear them catalogued over a kitchen table as either triumphs or tragedies.
It was very clear, however, that his father hadn’t noticed. Across the room, Richard was standing up a little taller in his place by the dresser while the Colonel told Phyllis proudly, ‘My son is set now for a part in what I suppose must be classed as the reconstruction work. The business he faces these days is the task we all face of re-establishing this life on the model we wish it to be. And, with that in mind, you’re chasing a lead off to Greece next, aren’t you, boy?’
Phyllis wasn’t impressed. I caught her lifting one sardonic eyebrow that was at once defiant and supremely elegant. ‘And do you often work abroad these days, Captain? Really? And are you destined to fight on this next trip? I quite fancy the idea of paying a second visit to Greece myself, but isn’t the country currently sinking in the mire of a bloody civil war?’
‘I’ll be in Athens. Where the government is. The fighting is further north.’
‘So you’re going to undertake – how did the Colonel here put it? – reconstruction work there? Because you know full well our government ditched its responsibilities to the Greeks earlier this year and left them to fight it out amongst themselves, and I’m trying to establish whether we should worry about you or not.’
All of a sudden I saw that I’d been mistaken about her motives here. This wasn’t an excruciating repetition of my attack on Richard’s nature or his choice of career. This probing was personal to me and it was because of that old correspondence that had made her familiar with all my childhood woes. It was a reference to my experience with the RAF man and she was testing to see whether Richard had a better grasp of truth and kindness than my brother’s friend had shown. She was doing it because she thought that I was naïve enough to let that little bit of bother about a first romance with a charming man repeat itself now. It was a repetition of that age-old slander against Richard’s name. She had, of course, no idea whatsoever that Richard would understand her opinion of my past history as well as I.
My intense restlessness wasn’t remotely relieved when Richard added with mock formality, ‘You know I can’t tell you the details of the job.’
He was amused rather than offended and I didn’t like the way his reply was making Phyllis smirk. I hoped he’d seen that her sharp humour tonight was not entirely her own. Now she was retorting in a contrary sort of fashion, ‘No? Do you enjoy the secrecy?’
‘No.’
He had seen. On a sudden very definite note, he stood up and crossed the room to set his glass down with a click upon the counter beside me. He turned to her. ‘And,’ he added, ‘to finally answer your real questions, at least in part, this next job will mean I will be briefly away, yes. After a few more weeks or so of preparation. And then I’ll be home again. My work is varied, Miss Jones, but not excessively gruelling. And, believe it or not, the principal reason why I chose to be a soldier – and still do – is not because I enjoy the fight.’
He was near me but looking at her as he added, ‘The truth is, I like the fact that my training has established my physical competence. It has given me confidence in the power of my actions, if you will, so that a significant vocabulary of alternatives is laid out before me. I
accept that I’ll have a part to play in future conflicts and I imagine I’ll always be given the task of responding to something insane that someone else has done, either in the manoeuvring of nations or, as it is these days, the criminal underhand dealings that run like a fraying seam through the aftermath of war. But I know just how hard-pressed things need to be before violence is the proportionate response. And for me the hope always remains that when I look back, the balance of my own actions will be on the side of reason.’
This, suddenly, was meant for me rather than her and marked the end of it for him. This was the close of the debate, whether resolved to her satisfaction or not. And it was then that I realised that while my cousin was trying all too hard to make me aware of an impending conflict between my perspective on life and Richard’s, it was all rather more a case that she was teasing him into acknowledging questions that she thought I ought to be worrying about rather than those I was actually asking. I mean, secrecy really wasn’t a difficulty for us. He had already told me the details that had prompted that other jibe of hers. He’d told me a little of the history of his injury. He’d offered it quietly, inconspicuously, outside the hospital because he’d wanted me to know and it rather proved the point he’d made to Phyllis about the impoliteness of asking, if it was only for the sake of defining a man.
Now Richard turned his head. ‘Father, I—’
The Colonel’s response made me certain now that he was determined to limit his son’s opportunities to speak directly to him. The old man pretended that he hadn’t quite heard and rushed in to say pompously, ‘Of course, if you ask Danny Hannis about his ideas for the future, he’ll just give you a long list of all the machines he’s worked on so far. He’s got a wonderful mind for mechanics, that boy. He looks after my car for me too. He thinks I don’t know, but I do.’ He tilted his glass in a toast to the absent man. ‘That’s why I was glad to stand as his guarantor when he bought that house.’