‘You must be patient,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps when the child is older.’
In lieu of a reply, Lavinia leaned over and kissed him, the heavy veil of her hair temporarily eclipsing his face.
To his surprise, the Colonel found the assertiveness of her gesture arousing. Catching her tongue between his lips, he pulled her under him, but when his hands searched out her breasts, the unfamiliar protrusion of her nipples, altered by breast-feeding, instantly dampened his enthusiasm.
‘Forgive me,’ he murmured as he extricated himself.
Smoothing down his ruffled hair, he reached again for his spectacles. Lavinia’s optimism stumbled then fell, like an ice skater who had miscalculated her pirouette.
12
HE SITS WITH HIS RIFLE across his knees. The shelling stops and the sudden silence makes him look up. He can even hear the faint cry of a circling hawk. White plumes of gunpowder smoke drifting across the sky part to reveal a gateway of azure. Heaven, oblivious of the Hell below, he thinks.
Stanley is sitting to his left. He always knows where Stanley is. He is James’s talisman. Fused to him through the war, the blood and the shit and, most terrifying of all, the tedium of waiting. There is a faint vibration. Stanley must be whistling, he thinks; a tiny drumming James can feel in his own lips. He turns.
The sky turns white then red, fragmenting as he is thrown against the sandbags. A shattered portrait of the young Queen tumbles to the bottom of the trench while beside him Stanley’s body shudders.
A moment later a Russian soldier hurls himself into the trench. James wrestles him to the ground. There is nothing but this: the shapeless mass of enemy, urine, fear, the stench of the young soldier’s breath as they roll over and over. James’s face presses against the mud of the trench, dirt filling his nostrils as the soldier reaches for his neck; James kicks out with his feet, twisting his body and jabbing with his elbow. The youth falls back, spread-eagled for a second. Lifting his bayonet, James thrusts it into his enemy’s throat. For Stanley, he whispers, for Stanley. The Russian, lying there, his face draining to a ghostly pallor, looks up in amazement at the exact diamond of sky James had been staring at moments before. His helmet tips off and now James can see. Can see the sapphire eyes, the jutting Slavic cheekbones, the beardless chin and the terrible youth of him.
It was a wailing, the hollow moaning of a male banshee, that woke Lavinia. The grey of early dawn splattered across the insides of her closed eyelids as she buried her head further into the pillow, but the wailing continued. She climbed out of bed and, after pulling on her dressing gown, stumbled across the corridor to her husband’s bedroom.
The bed sheets were twisted around his thrashing body; his lips were pulled back over his teeth, his skin taut to the skull. His eyes were open, the pupils dilated, and darted from one invisible opponent to another as he fought the blankets.
‘James!’
His body stiffened; his eyes closed as he fell back onto the pillows. A second later he woke. ‘Again?’ he murmured.
Lavinia nodded. James stared at her, shivering as the sweat dried on his skin. He looked utterly exhausted. ‘Oh God.’
‘I wish I could help you.’
‘I do not need help!’
Wanting to hold him, but knowing he was unpredictable when his night fears possessed him, she stayed her hand.
‘It’s just the disease of an old soldier, that’s all. The dead stain our dreams, all of us who have fought and killed.’
Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he felt blindly for the hypodermic syringe he had purchased from Ferguson’s a week ago at the recommendation of his doctor. The medic had promised that morphine injected into the muscle tissue would free the Colonel of his laudanum addiction. Bringing the needle down to his thigh, Huntington pushed the drug into his flesh. Loathing the sight of the thick spike breaking the skin, Lavinia looked away.
He lay back against the pillows and waited for the opiate to slither its caressing way through his body. It was like watching a cloud moving across the sun, Lavinia thought; the muscles in his face relaxing as the pain lifted like a veil.
Suddenly, she felt a dampness across the front of her nightdress—lactation. As if on cue a whimpering sounded from the adjoining room. Then the child began to scream.
‘Go to him if you must,’ James muttered without opening his eyes.
Slipping through the half-open door of the nursery, Lavinia felt in the dark for a candle. Her son’s small fists gripped the top of the wooden rails, his screaming face a scrunched rag. After lifting him out of the cot, she collapsed into an armchair and freed her breast from the neck of her nightdress. The child, who had his mother’s heavy mouth and pronounced chin and his father’s deep-set eyes, reached for the nipple greedily.
As he suckled, Lavinia stared drowsily at a small portrait of James and his mother, dimly illuminated by the candle. The grim-faced young woman, in a riding outfit and brandishing a crop, sat on a poised black stallion. Beside them, the infant James, in an identical riding coat, perched solidly on a small pony—a diminutive patriarch. Even at the age of five he bristled with territorial masculinity.
It had been painted for James’s father as a miniature to take with him when soldiering. Eduard Le Coneur had been a young naval officer—and an Huguenot refugee from the first wave of the French revolution. He had died prematurely after contracting rabies from a dog’s bite—an inglorious death which had embittered his young wife. The Viscountess had reverted to her maiden name and had never married again.
She displayed little affection for her son, other than a paranoia that, like his father, Death might claim him in the most unexpected places. It was an obsession that caused the young boy much mortification during his time at Eton, resulting in a bombardment of letters to the house master about the school’s sanitary conditions, the food, the dangers of the playing fields, and any other element that could bring about her child’s untimely demise.
Upon leaving Eton, determined to rid himself of his mother’s stifling protectiveness, James apprenticed himself to a distant cousin, a general in the army, who was happy to assist in the young man’s promotion. James began his military career at twenty, enthusiastically accepting the most dangerous posts across the Empire. Then at thirty, blessed with a generous annual income and a fashionable residence in Mayfair, he resigned from the army and, inspired by the example of Lt General Pitt Rivers, pursued a career as an anthropologist, joining expeditions into Australia, the Amazon and Africa. In the manner of the French philosopher Rousseau, he adopted the belief that primitive man was pristine, free of evil and sin—a hypothesis that was essentially optimistic, and one that Lavinia subscribed to.
The Crimean War broke out in 1853 and James, now forty-two, volunteered. After surviving malaria, smallpox and yellow fever, he had concluded that, thankfully, he had escaped his mother’s fatalism. Deeming himself blessed and therefore invincible, the intrepid Colonel began to test his theory by placing himself in increasingly dangerous situations, both on the battlefield and off. When his second officer and closest friend, Stanley Dickenson, was killed, his conjecture was confirmed. He had told Lavinia, Death had chosen to ignore him over and over. He had convinced her that it had been both a sobering and an invigorating notion but one that had shook him from his inherent lassitude. In civilian life, it propelled him into the opium dens of Shanghai, the brothels of Buenos Aires and, finally, to the shamans of the Amazon.
The child stopped suckling and fell instantly asleep at the breast. Lavinia closed her eyes, not wanting to wake Aidan. The diminishing world shrank to the scent of her son’s wispy hair and the sweetish smell of breast milk. She was woken from her doze by the click of the door.
‘It has to stop, Lavinia.’ James stood over them, swaying slightly, his face puffy from sleep. ‘The breast-feeding is unbecoming for a woman of your status. Besides, the child is old enough to be weaned.’
‘But it’s what all good mothers do.’
His raised voice woke the child who started grumbling. Shocked, Lavinia drew her son back to her breast. How dare he prevent her from raising her child the way she intended. Surely that was a mother’s prerogative. Can he care more for social mores than plain instinctive sense, she wondered.
‘I believe it to be better for the child,’ she began.
‘Lavinia, we will not debate this. I have made myself clear.’
Lavinia tried to control her fury. I refuse to poison my milk with anger, she thought. Her mind struggled impotently against her husband’s authority, before she decided she had little choice. She was expected to obey him.
The Colonel looked down at Aidan pushing blindly against Lavinia’s breast. He had been surprised at the magnitude of feeling he held for his son. Even now, at this early stage, he recognised traits in the child that he knew to be his own: Aidan’s impatience; his fascination for anything natural—animals, plants, the shape of his eyes and mouth, the long thick fingers and broad palms. These were all his.
Reaching out, he lifted the sleeping child to his chest. Immediately the boy’s hand curled around his father’s pyjama collar, making a tiny fist.
This act of creation has made me a good man. This life is the payment for all the lives I have taken, the Colonel vowed silently, now determined to protect and nurture his child in a way that his own parents never had.
As he cradled his son in his arms, the opiate transformed his thoughts into grandiose declarations that seemed to wind around the pattern of the wallpaper.
13
California, 2002
JULIA LEANED AGAINST THE railings, her hair a whirling furore that caught at her lips and snaked across her nose and eyes. The memory of their lovemaking suddenly spread through her body; the intensity of her orgasm now resounding. The couple stood on the deck of the Catalina Express ferry, buffeted by the wind. Klaus had organised a surprise visit to a jazz concert at the Ballroom on the island. He had a habit of orchestrating mysterious events: the whole of their courtship and marriage had been peppered by such occasions—day visits to Napa Valley vineyards, rock concerts, picnics in unusual places, sailing trips, his proposal in the hot-air balloon, a tour of the haunted sites of Los Angeles, a night visit to William Randolph Hearst’s castle; once he had even taken her on a tour of the city’s sewers. These occasions had come to frame their relationship—emotional and geographical reference points that became mythologised by memory.
Julia loved him for it. It was as if she was discovering her own country again through his eyes. Klaus’s child-like delight in astonishing her, as well as his sense of adventure and thirst for the unusual, kept her from complete absorption in her work. Without him, she suspected she might lose her sense of play altogether.
They had taken the ferry from Long Beach. It was one of those spring afternoons when the light seemed to cut a clear edge around everything. As the boat sliced through the water, Julia watched the frothing waves descending away from the prow, exciting ripples that raced across the surface of the turquoise bay. Mesmerised by the rhythm of this constant movement, she found herself wondering about nature and the continuous renewal and atrophy that made up the physical world.
‘You have to grasp your own piece of time and ride it, ride the whole wave until it peters out onto the foreshore,’ she said out loud, forgetting herself.
Klaus, standing against her, his face turned into the wind, only caught every third word.
‘What?’ he asked, but, deafened by the boat engine and the sea, Julia only saw his lips move. Looking up, she smiled back reassuringly, then pressed herself against him. His arms curled around her, his face now in her hair, a hidden swirl of confusion and sadness.
Oblivious, Julia leaned over the railing and was instantly reabsorbed in the submerged cosmos beneath the parting waves.
It was typical of Julia, Klaus thought, she had this rare capacity to be completely captivated by the act of observation and, like a chameleon, become an invisible watcher. He glanced at her profile: the strong nose that arched nobly, the jet-black straight hair that hung to her shoulders, the blue hunger of her eyes. Almost as tall as him, she had broad shoulders that could cradle a large man like him comfortably. She was everything he had wanted—intellectually stimulating, funny, ambitious, sexually adventurous—and yet here he was, torn between this moment and a parallel existence that pulled violently at his instinct. Where would he be at fifty, even sixty? He shut his eyes, trying to imagine the three of them as a family, his son’s tiny hand linking the two of them—he couldn’t visualise it. He should be able to know it, to see their future. He swallowed, fear bobbing in his throat like an apple in a barrel.
‘There’s something else…’ he mouthed into the roaring wind, knowing Julia couldn’t hear a word. He’d planned everything, and now he’d arrived at this junction he found himself gripped by an irrational terror. Could he do it? Was he capable of such a finite decision?
The blasting horn of the ferry momentarily obliterated his anxieties as the boat swung towards the small harbour of Avalon.
They were standing right in front of the stage in the Catalina Ballroom—a circular neo-classical building positioned on a peninsula originally built as a small opera house by the chewing gum magnate Wrigley when the family owned the island in the 1920s. The building—now a ballroom and casino—was spectacular. A balcony, with pillars and arches, ran all the way around, providing a 360-degree panorama of LA harbour and the luxury yachts and boats twinkling and swaying in the small port of Avalon directly below.
Julia loved Catalina, the quaintness of its immaculately maintained small cottages and fishing shacks that ran up its slopes. A haven for celebrities during the 1920s and ’30s it had somehow retained its individuality. It had a fairytale quality, an old-worldliness that seemed unimaginable given the bustling proximity of Los Angeles.
The band’s saxophonist was dwarfed by the alto saxophone she was welded to; swaying, it was as if she was making love through the instrument itself, its rich tones spilling out into the treacly, humid night. She broke into the first notes of ‘My Funny Valentine’; as the double bass plucked at the backbone beneath, Julia’s body thrilled to the music. A Spanish guitar, keyboard and drums joined in, building the refrain with a poignant tenderness.
Julia and Klaus were pressed between a group of four young girls and a middle-aged couple who sounded as if they might be from the Midwest. The wife, well over fifty and about twenty stone, began to sing along loudly. Determined to block her out, Julia stayed focused on the saxophonist, on the interweaving notes soaring up toward the chandeliers. The song ended and, turning, Julia suddenly noticed that Klaus had left her side.
She found him out on the balcony, leaning against one of the arches that framed the view. He was staring towards the city—now a twinkling mirage of distant lights set against the fading crimson of the sunset.
‘You’ve been really quiet since I got back. Is everything okay?’
He glanced at her then back out to sea. ‘A lot changed while you were away. I guess I found the time to find myself.’
Wondering at this sudden despondency, she wrapped her hand around his arm. ‘Am I that demanding?’ she joked.
‘Not demanding so much as all encompassing. Somehow you manage to fill a space completely. I guess it’s like uneven magnetic fields—I am always in your orbit.’
‘Not from my axis: you’re all that’s on my horizon.’ She searched his eyes but found them vacant. Shivering, she nestled into his jacket. ‘You know, I used to think happiness was something dramatic, something that happened suddenly. Now I think it’s like a constant note you’re barely aware of until those rare and wonderful occasions when it suddenly intensifies and you find yourself standing on a balcony in some tiny opera house at the edge of the Pacific, and you think, wow, how did this happen?’
Now he looked at her. ‘Julia…’
She waite
d, wondering at the strange play of emotions that ran like scene changes across his face.
‘What, sweetheart?’
He hesitated, then, shaking his head, pulled away from her. ‘Nothing. I have to go to the restroom. I’ll see you back inside.’
As he left, she turned back to the glistening skyline and vowed to take him with her on her next research trip.
Klaus stumbled into a cubicle and locked the door. Slamming the toilet lid down, he sat on it and buried his face in his hands, great silent sobs racking his whole frame. His mobile phone, tucked in his jacket pocket, began to ring. Ignoring it, he held himself tighter.
14
Mayfair, 1861
THE SMELL OF HOT LEMON tea and porridge laced with whisky drifted up from the silver tray the maid had placed over Lavinia’s lap. She sat in the four-poster bed, yawning, as the maid pulled open the curtains. Outside, the chestnut trees and windows of the Georgian houses were a wash of black, green and pale grey. The winter light barely managed to tinge the park and the square.
‘Would you like the Queen, madam? It is expected that you follow the events of the day.’
Not much older than Lavinia, the maid had been hired specifically to address the shortcomings of the young wife’s etiquette. Expecting a rebuff, she bravely held out a copy of the leading social broadsheet James had insisted his wife subscribe to.
‘Why not, Daisy? Let’s examine the glorious adventures of the Upper Ten Thousand At Home and Abroad, a group to which, evidently, we do not belong.’
The Upper Ten Thousand was a listing of the elite members of English society—a fiction invented by the broadsheet to fuel the ambitions of the middle-class matron, a recent social phenomenon desperate to mimic her aristocratic counterparts.
Lavinia began reading sarcastically.
‘The Prince Consort attended a hunt at Finchley; surrounded by his attendants and several of the Royal children he was a fine and invigorating sight. Meanwhile, in the city, Lady Waldegrave held a late supper for many of the parliamentarian figures. It was said that Disraeli was in attendance. Hugh Lupus Grosvenor was seen at St James’s Park last week for the Changing of the Guard. The Queen will today receive the Viceroy of India in a reception to be held at Buckingham Palace…’
Soul Page 8