Eleanor and her aunt arrived at the station well before Robert’s train was due to arrive. They’d been in London ever since the Mowbrays had rushed off to Yorkshire with no plans to return for David’s show. Lady Anne was frantic about Margaret, afraid the shock would make her deliver the baby too early and they’d lose him, too. She was sure it was a boy.
Kate would come to London, of course. She wrote that Margaret was holding on so far, controlling herself admirably. Staunch: the word came to Eleanor as she read Kate’s letter, along with Stansfield’s well-known voice. “One can count on Margaret. I shall. For life, you know.” Irony wherever you turned these days. The gods may have retreated to Mount Olympus but they sat there raining down mockery.
“There he is,” her aunt said, touching Eleanor’s arm. An officer was striding into the station through the same entrance they’d taken from the street. A brief clench of the heart, yet Eleanor chiefly felt puzzled. She knew it was Robert but didn’t recognize him, or have any idea why he would be arriving from the street. He wore a weary battle-stained overcoat that drew approving glances from the few scattered families on the platform. And while the overcoat looked large, Robert didn’t seem as tall or as muscular as Eleanor remembered. Tall enough, but slimmer, and as he got closer, she saw that he’d changed.
His face was thin now, the cheekbones sharper, his grey eyes deeper with a smudge of exhaustion beneath them, despite having been home for six days. Nor had she noticed before that he had such a pretty mouth. His upper lip lacked the double peak that most people had. It was as smooth and almost as full as his lower lip, which had a slight look of stubbornness.
She focused on the lips, unable to meet his eyes. Robert was greeting them, his mouth moving, but Eleanor couldn’t take in a word. Nor did she know what she felt. Mainly fear, aware that he could be torpedoed tomorrow when he shipped back across the Channel. Daring a glance, she met his grey eyes with such a jolt that they both blushed and looked aside.
“Did you get here on an earlier train?” her aunt asked, easy and pleasant, valiantly covering the confusion.
“I walked.”
“From Kent?” her aunt asked. “When on earth did you set out? Have you had any sleep?”
“Slept rough last night,” Robert said. “I knew it would be warm enough, with the clouds. Bunking down on the good clean dirt of England.”
It wasn’t only the gods raining irony. They turned as they heard a train approach the station, its chuff and pump amplified as it drove under the Himalayan ceiling, a hollow echo bouncing back from girders lined with roosting pigeons. The screech of brakes as it pulled in scattered hundreds of birds. Such a flapping confusion of wings. Eleanor wondered if pigeons were clever enough to remember that the scatter would be repeated when a new train pulled in five minutes later.
Mrs. Crosby led them out of the station before the flood of passengers got out. She walked at a surprising clip. They soon reached the cab ranks and she told a driver to take them to the Savoy, where she liked one of the restaurants. She expected Robert was hungry—“rather famished,” he agreed—and established that his mother was well enough, back to walking, and that while of course as Eleanor’s aunt she was their chaperone “in society’s eyes,” the demand of unspecified errands meant she would leave them at the Savoy, seeing them again at David Arden’s opening.
Robert sat beside her aunt in the cab, Eleanor across from them, looking at her folded hands. She felt panicked by the thought of Mrs. Crosby leaving them alone. So far, she hadn’t been able to manage more than a few words, and while Robert answered each of her aunt’s questions thoroughly, probably too thoroughly, he had no real conversation, either. Something about enclosed spaces took away Eleanor’s breath. Enclosed spaces that rattled. She preferred walking and riding, and understood why Robert had walked from Kent. Eleanor would happily leap from the cab this minute and walk all the way to Yorkshire.
“Here you are, then,” Mrs. Crosby said, and Eleanor realized that the horses had stopped. A man in the Savoy uniform was opening the door, beaming approval at the handsome captain getting out and giving his hand to a fashionably dressed girl. (The grey-green afternoon dress and a new stunner of a hat. Eleanor did like hats.) But the doorman’s approval made her feel an object in the public eye, and she found herself clinging to the open door as her aunt said goodbye, a panicked appeal in her eyes that only made Mrs. Crosby flick her wrist below the level of the window. Off with you.
It was a marvellous change from the days when her aunt had tried to make her marry Edward Denholm. Instead, fully sanctioned by Mrs. Crosby—and without a chaperone—Eleanor found herself walking into the Savoy on Robert’s arm. In the bustle of luggage and elderly bellboys, she grew conscious of the hundreds of anonymous rooms hired out above. Of the beds. No mother would have left her there, although it would be just like her aunt to silently raise an issue and expect Eleanor to finesse it, coming back engaged.
They couldn’t see the restaurant Mrs. Crosby had recommended. Robert had to hive over to the concierge to ask for directions, but turned the wrong way as soon as they left the counter. Eleanor knew it was the wrong way but couldn’t manage to tell him. When they reached the lifts, Robert turned back in some confusion, still not seeing the restaurant and heading off in another wrong direction. A faint slick of perspiration rose on his handsome upper lip, and Eleanor felt like a croquet ball pocked around a lawn. Alice in Wonderland’s game of croquet, the hoops made of doubled-over soldiers.
Finally, a bellboy took them in hand. The restaurant proved to be a vast field of tables. Underneath a high tent-like ceiling, it was loud with prosperous gentlemen and matrons, the ladies showing off the latest fashions as if they’d never heard of the war, their husbands probably running it. At a table by himself, half hidden by a palm tree, Eleanor saw a member of the war cabinet, she couldn’t remember whom, eating his soup through mustachios he used as a sieve. She thought of the Hon. Lieutenant Newton-Pye, heir to the Earl of Grimsby, human walrus, killed this spring in France.
Robert looked thoroughly overheated by now and took off his overcoat as they stood in the entrance, drawing notice to his tunic. There was a perceptible silence, the handsome captain making people look up from their meals, the notice swiftly followed by approval, either murmurs or significant nods or doting silence from the matrons. A thin woman raised her hands, prepared to clap if anyone else did.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Robert said. Still holding his overcoat, he turned on his heel and strode out of the restaurant, forcing Eleanor to sprint to keep up with him, out of the hotel and into the Strand, where he finally stopped, taking off his hat and pushing back his hair with the heel of one hand. He gave her a look of surprising distress. “I’m sorry. I simply didn’t like the look of the place.”
“I didn’t like them liking the look of you,” she said. Robert gave her a glance that dissolved into amusement, becoming more like himself. Himself as he had been.
“If you really don’t mind,” he said. “There might be something better . . .” He gestured east along the Strand and started walking, overcoat over one arm, not offering her the other one, walking a bit more slowly but still forcing her to keep up her pace to stay beside him.
They reached Fleet Street without Robert seeing anything suitable. Not that he seemed to be looking, his eyes focused down the road. He turned north along Chancery Lane, still not seeming to see anything, soon angling northeast toward Holborn, workmen and carts and horses taking the place of the motor cars chuffing along the Strand, the smell more rural despite the brick offices crowding in on either side.
Eleanor realized Robert had forgotten about eating and probably about her. She was seeing panic, Robert a piece of shrapnel flung out of France. If any of the workmen had spoken to her as rudely as the men near Arden’s studio, Robert would have punched him. Eleanor had no idea what to do until he stopped abruptly, as if waking up, looking around and noticing a low eatery across the road with a grimy small-paned Dickensian window, the glass as thick as old bottles.
“What about that one?” he asked, entirely reasonably, as if they’d been talking all the while, considering one restaurant after the other and rejecting others before now.
“If you like,” she said, and he gave a considered nod before crossing the road and opening the door.
Cooked onions. Grease, at least not rancid. Looking around, Eleanor had an idea she’d been here before. She couldn’t imagine when, although the long low narrow wood-partitioned room probably predated Dickens, likely an ancient tavern, meaning she could have strolled in any time over the past fifteen hundred years. Set Mr. Stickley digging in the basement and he’d find a Roman goddess five feet under. (Lieutenant Stickley.) The proprietor edged forward crab-like to meet them. He was busy with a cloth, wiping one finger after the other, doing it slowly enough to make it clear that he had no use for the likes of them.
“Yes, hofficer, how can I ’elp?” he asked, his half-dozen customers either ignoring them or staring belligerently at Robert’s tunic. Eleanor wondered if this was a warren of conchies, then heard the exaggerated “hofficer” and realized that this was about rank and class. The proprietor could have said “captain” and spoken better English. Everyone recognized pips these days.
“If you’ve got a table free?” Robert asked, when obviously there were plenty.
“My boy’s over there,” the proprietor said. “And ’e don’t half like what’s going on. No more do I.”
“No more do any of us,” Robert said. “But we get on with it, don’t we?”
The clientele liked that, nods and murmurs, Robert passing a test. After his own slow nod, the proprietor flexed his chin at a table, where Robert took a seat with his back against the wall. The eatery wasn’t Dickensian, Eleanor realized, sitting down across from him. It was a trench, and now Robert was safe.
The proprietor hovered, waiting for their order. Robert said casually, “Whatever you’ve got, and plenty of it.”
The man liked that, too. “And the lidy?”
“I’ve eaten, thank you. But some coffee would be nice.”
The proprietor leaned in confidentially. “The coffee ain’t up to much,” he said, as if speaking about someone else’s establishment.
“If it’s hot?” Eleanor asked, another acceptable answer. Two mugs quickly appeared and he was right; it was dreadful. Cooked grounds. But sipping it provided another excuse not to talk, and so did the plate their proprietor soon slung in front of Robert. A fry-up, she thought it was called. Only when Robert had devoured most of it and got to the kidneys did he stop. A fastidious expression passed over his face at the sight of the kidneys and he pushed his plate away.
“I’m sorry about Stansfield,” he said, and Eleanor couldn’t help recoiling. She had to force herself to meet his eyes.
“Yes,” she said.
Something about his sister being her closest friend and they must have known each other since they were children. He sounded insincere, and Eleanor wondered if he’d seen so much death that one more didn’t matter.
“We’ve lost, Middleford has lost quite a few boys,” she said. Poor Mrs. Flodden, hoping that being in the Red Cross would get her Bob through. “But I knew Stansfield all my life, and it’s difficult. Far worse for his family, of course. His poor mother. Although Stansfield’s commanding officer was kind enough to write. Apparently he died instantly of a head wound.”
The faintest movement of Robert’s handsome mouth, although he nodded gravely. Eleanor couldn’t have felt more naïve. The mother of every boy killed on the western front was probably told he’d died of a head wound, without pain, instantly, or perhaps with a final prayer on his lips that would take him directly . . .
“What really happened? Do you know?”
Robert sat back, clearly sorry he’d brought it up, not wanting to have this conversation. But there was a core honesty about him, and he had to tell her, “I heard he’d been killed not long before I left France, and I knew my brother would want me to look into it. They’d gone to school together, as I’m sure you remember.”
“I don’t think I ever knew how they’d met. They seemed unlikely friends.”
“Mowbray was someone to count on. My brother always thought of himself as someone who wasn’t. Each supplied what the other lacked.” A brief glance. “That might have changed. In Edward, I mean.”
Eleanor didn’t want to talk about Edward. “I remember thinking that Stansfield would make an excellent officer. He needed to be active.”
“Not always advisable,” Robert said, before checking himself. “I’m sure he was, but I’m afraid that’s no guarantee of getting through. I think we should find another subject, if you don’t mind.”
He tried to come up with something and couldn’t. Eleanor waited him out, not sure she wanted to hear it any more than he wanted to say it.
“He was wounded leading an assault on a machine gun position,” Robert said finally, giving in and resenting it. “It wasn’t a head wound. Abdomen. They aim for that. Bigger target. We do the same. But the stretcher-bearers got him out alive, and he was in an ambulance on his way to hospital when the ambulance had a smash-up. The driver thought he could skirt a shell hole in the road, or thought it wasn’t all that deep. The water covers that up, you see. So in he went, and Mowbray wasn’t in good enough shape to escape a second . . . insult, I believe the medical types call it. Not that he was likely to have made it anyway.”
When Eleanor was silent, fighting tears, Robert said aggressively, “You wanted to know.”
“Did you?” Eleanor asked. “I imagine you’ve seen far worse. But I mean, when you decided to go in for the army, did you want to know these things?” Finding her handkerchief but only able to crush it. “That’s a serious question.”
“Do you mean am I a damned bloodthirsty . . .”
“No. But do men, going off to war, do, do, they think it’s going to be edifying? Do they want to know? Find their purpose in life? Their role? That’s a serious question. I remember you writing after the Marne about the exhilaration of being tested in battle.”
“Do I look exhilarated, Eleanor?”
Eleanor, not Nora. He spoke gently, but there was dislike in his eyes, not necessarily directed at her, or not all of it. She allowed herself a moment.
“You’re not there,” she said. “You’re back home, and I can see that we must strike you as naïve. Absurdly so. People keep telling me”—doing an exaggerated Elizabeth Mortlake—“‘The boys want sweet little girls to, to, come home to.’” Blushing, but determined to go on. “You told me once yourself that in fighting for England, you felt you were fighting for people like me. You felt a need to protect us. But I wonder when it comes down to it if we’re irrelevant, if not awfully boring or, or as repulsive as you found the Savoy. What’s important is the exhilaration you feel facing the ultimate. To know. The very height of life. I keep wondering if that’s what men really want. If it’s why you keep agreeing to fight, generation after generation after . . . Stansfield rushing to learn.”
“If that’s what you’ve come up with, I wouldn’t call you naïve.”
Robert stood up abruptly, throwing some money on the table and taking his hat and his overcoat. Eleanor wondered if he was going to leave her here. He seemed capable of it.
“I don’t imagine you want any more coffee,” he said.
Eleanor stood up, still wearing a hat that suddenly struck her as ridiculous, and Robert offered his arm to walk her past the crab-like proprietor and out of the trench, leaving her unable to predict anything that was going to happen between them.
Robert stopped outside the eatery. Without Mrs. Crosby, neither of them had any idea what to do next. Eleanor got stuck when she remembered she needed new stockings, unable to get the stockings out of her head, and the fact it was impossible to take Robert shopping. They shuffled in place, darting glances at each other like schoolchildren with a mutually embarrassing pash.
Just at the edge of Eleanor’s understanding was what soldiers wanted when left so improperly alone with their girls, if that’s who she was; what mothers warned they wanted; what Robert might have had in mind all along without, she half suspected, knowing how to get it from someone like her, even in a hotel, or especially in a hotel, which had panicked him. It simply wasn’t done with a respectable girl, trusted by her aunt; certainly not with a girl who didn’t know how to go about helping him even if she could work out whether she wanted to or not.
She wanted to. Robert would be back at the front in days, where he could die in an instant. Eleanor felt half inside her dream of the African savannah, wading through the waist-high grass, Robert beside her, arm around her, bending down to kiss her, his steady grey eyes reflecting back the golden grass and sun. Gold and grey, colours that spoke to each other. A yawning lion. Humidity that drenched her.
Not that she could have answered if someone had asked whether she loved Robert. If they asked who he was. Who she was and what on earth she was doing here.
Yes, she loved him. She didn’t know why but she did and it terrified her. What she might lose without ever having it. What she might be better off losing before she learned the value of what she’d lost.
“I wonder if we might try the National Gallery?” she asked in a panic. “I thought . . . since we’re having an artistic day.”
“Are we?” Robert asked humorously, in his eyes an acknowledgment of all this. Regret? And something else you saw in men’s eyes, more elemental. But he didn’t push, although she wished he had, instead turning and setting off. It was a long walk to Trafalgar Square and maybe that was the attraction. Ahead he marched, keeping his eye on the invisible horizon. Eleanor knew now that he was marching. Not even when they turned the corner around St. Martin’s in the Field did he pause to glance up at the clock—near 2 p.m.—and wonder, as she did, how they were going to fill the remaining three hours until David’s opening. How to fill them without ruining everything.
Fortunately, the National Gallery proved to be a network of trenches, at least once you started seeing things in that light. Long narrow galleries, few windows, a heavy protection of ceiling and—what seemed important to Robert—working men who tipped their caps. Maybe he needed Tommies around so he could keep on being an officer. In the gallery, the guards even wore uniforms.
They strolled past the paintings, not really looking, but finally able to talk about ordinary things. Robert’s mother wanted to move out of Ackley Castle into a more comfortable house, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. His brother had been part of the aerial photography initiative over Neuve Chapelle. Got a battering from the winds, and she was right, they flew motorized kites. But for the first time, they’d mapped an enemy position, giving the old men a leg up on planning the offensive that soon followed. Modern warfare. Too bad about the old-fashioned weather, the torrential rains that were half the reason (but only half) for that particular defeat. Eleanor told Robert that the Hon. Walrus had died at Neuve Chapelle and he said he was sorry, although he didn’t sound it.
Their conversation wasn’t ordinary. Even a year ago, Eleanor would have been stunned by the death of so many boys she knew, by the number of young widows and bereft fiancées; at the sight of all the wounded lads shuffling through the streets like an army of old men. Zeppelin raids on Vauxhall Bridge, conchies beaten while handing out pamphlets, girls thrusting white feathers at men not in uniform. And Goodwood going to be a hospital, she said. Some Middleford girls were already working as VADs but her aunt wouldn’t hear of Eleanor training, not even for Goodwood hospital.
“Quite right,” Robert said.
“Please don’t say that. I’d like to have a purpose, some role. Lately I seem to be of little more use than a hat stand. And you haven’t even noticed my hat.”
Robert gave her an amused glance but kept walking. “I think it’s up here,” he said, having claimed to be looking for a painting. She thought he’d forgotten, but now he stopped in front of a Renaissance work, The Raising of Lazarus, Christ on the left lifting one flat palm to Heaven while pointing his other index finger at Lazarus, as if he were gathering electricity from the heavens to spark Lazarus back from the dead. To the right of the canvas was an incredulous-looking Lazarus removing his graveclothes as spectators gaped with shock.
“When my brother and I first saw the picture, we were little horrors. Lazarus, of course, having been dead for four days, and the two of us very well aware of the state of birds and animals dead for half that time, especially in hot weather. Yet there he is, looking ready for a bout of wrestling, and likely to win it.”
Robert half smiled, although he didn’t seem to see the painting, or was seeing it with Edward.
“Mockery being an effort to cover up fear, of course. I had nightmares after seeing it, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster coming after me, the sewn-together body parts. Since here”—knocking his knuckle against the picture frame—“the putrification of the body is made unmistakable by being so emphatically denied.
“You asked why I went into the military,” he said, still looking at the painting. “To confront one’s fears? Or find some meaning before we become dead meat? Of which, believe me, I’ve seen sufficient lately.”
Robert shrugged. “Probably a little bit of this and a little bit of that, like Mrs. Cook making her cake. But when you get over there, none of it matters. You’re there because you’re there, just as we’re here because we’re here. Is there any purpose or meaning?”
Eleanor waited for him to answer his question. When she realized he wasn’t going to, she said, “I was thinking lately about the gods retreating to Mount Olympus, but still raining down mockery. If you’re right, and mockery is meant to cover up fear, then the gods are afraid of us. Maybe they should be.”
Robert blew out his breath, seeming to agree.
“I do like your hat,” he said, tweaking its brim. Eleanor slipped her arm through his, leaning against him ever so slightly. They walked on silently, not looking at any more art than before, but afterwards finding a place for tea.
David Arden’s paintings were of No Man’s Land. Not quite the same as the religious works in the National Gallery, but this time Robert was looking at them, circling the gallery. They mostly showed the front from a distance, an indistinct and featureless moonscape of craters and slumped and slumping earth, all of it made wispy by fog or smoke. The canvases were pale, the cloudy light yellow and jaundiced, as Kate had said, something like a pea-souper. The only colour came from a few muted figures in the medium distance holding weapons and sometimes wearing red crosses. They were painted off-centre: slightly abstracted men behaving heroically.
Eleanor walked beside Robert, stopping at one canvas that showed stretcher-bearers carrying a wounded Tommy. Robert kept moving, and after a brief look, she followed him to an image of ambulances moved away from the viewer, ant-like men marching beside them. The next showed ruined houses that on closer examination were functioning as billets with clothes hung out the windows, or maybe blown out the windows, or maybe those weren’t just clothes. Here was David returning to all that in his paintings. It made her think of Odysseus visiting the underworld, the ghost of Tiresias appearing and saying, “Why, poor man, have you left the light of day and come down to visit the dead in this sad place?”
Kate had met them at the door. “Don’t ask about home. I have to get through this.” She’d leaned against Eleanor as Robert nodded and went directly to the paintings, not speaking to anyone else. The images had pulled him, she supposed. There were plenty of other people in the square gas-lit gallery. One was a solitary lurking man whom Eleanor thought must be an official from the Ministry, keeping an eye on things, but most were gathered into fluid talkative groups that broke apart and re-formed—artistic types wearing exaggerated versions of Kate’s clothes. Eleanor particularly noticed two tall women, a beautiful one they called Vanessa and an eccentric named Ottoline with hair coloured the same scarlet as the macaws in the London zoo. They intimidated Eleanor, and she didn’t know any of the others. On top of which, her aunt was late. Eleanor had soon joined Robert in looking at the paintings.
The final one halted her: a tent of wounded men in rows of beds with nurses working among them. It was as faded as the depictions of No Man’s Land and bore more than a slight resemblance to a graveyard with its rows of oblong stones. She looked at Robert, but he didn’t want to talk, and began circling the paintings again. Eleanor decided that she’d had enough and turned to look again for her aunt. She still wasn’t here, but David Arden had left the other artists to stand on his own. He was wearing his uniform, the wound patch redundant given his hook, and he was watching Robert examine his paintings with something like hunger. At that moment, Robert turned and saw him, and there was an exchange of salutes, not unironical. Each knew who the other must be, although Kate hurried over to introduce them, freeing Robert from a spell.
“Would you like one in your library, sir?” David asked.
“I’ll be back there in a couple of days,” Robert said.
“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get back myself. But they don’t seem to want me,” David replied, raising his hook. “Despite my cleverly curved bayonet.”
Eleanor could see these simple sentences were as laden with meaning as poetry, a code she didn’t have the key to. The whiff of discord was enough to draw the artists over, and soon Eleanor found herself surrounded by a discussion of art that sounded equally coded. David’s work apparently stood in contrast to an exhibition across town by a group of artists disliked by the talkative man who had arranged David’s show, Roger Fry. He was scathing in his criticism of the other artists, who called themselves the Vorticists and portrayed modern life as a machine. Good on David for rejecting the vortical blast, Fry said, taking a stand for impressionism with his fine exploration of light.
Eleanor had no idea what any of this meant. She slipped away to look at the paintings again, not seeing any other option with her aunt so late. Kate’s word jaundice jaundice jaundice beat in her head, and this time she saw the Flanders of David’s paintings as being sickened by war. Following one of the walls around a corner, she was surprised to walk into a small anteroom, and even more surprised to see three canvases with Kate’s signature, portraits rather than landscapes, two brightly slashed visions of women and a little boy.
She thought this might be work Kate had done in South Africa when David had gone there for the Illustrated London News. She’d written about painting Boer families left without a man by the last war. The boy was elfin and the women were thin, the women’s angularity not quite beautiful but striking, challenging the viewer as they stared out from the canvases. Eleanor thought about the literal sense of striking. The intensity in the women’s eyes struck a blow at viewers. Others might have seen their lives as dun and restricted, as washed-out as David’s No Man’s Land, but Kate had painted them in colours both raw and intense. Umber. Indigo. Chinese red. The muted grey-green that Eleanor loved.
“She’s better than he is, isn’t she?” a woman asked.
Turning, Eleanor saw the macaw at her elbow, the tall odd-looking woman. The tall odd-looking lady, she corrected herself, registering her more fully.
“I like them,” Eleanor said. “But I’m her friend. I don’t know what a critic would say.”
“She’s a woman. They don’t say anything.”
If they could have talked as openly as the lady seemed to wish, Eleanor would have asked about Roger Fry’s motives in getting David an exhibition. Whether he’d done it less to help David than to take a stand against the artists he disliked, the mechanical ones. But the woman’s batty imperiousness frightened Eleanor a little and she couldn’t seem to frame an intelligent question.
“So you think she ought to be satisfied exhibiting three paintings in a closet?” the lady asked, mistaking Eleanor’s silence. “Through the charity of her husband?”
“Not at all.”
“So you dislike the position of women? When we’re rather taunted with just a hint of respect these days. An atom of it, held just out of reach.”
The tall lady held her hand up with surprising grace, dangling an invisible something, as if she were holding a sprig of mistletoe. Eleanor was tall herself but the woman had long arms and loomed over her oddly, casting a scythe-like shadow in the anteroom. I’d like to be useful, Eleanor wanted to say, but didn’t want to sound naïve.
“So how does one avoid exhibiting in closets?” Eleanor asked.
“Of course, one can’t hold it against him.”
“Against whom?” Eleanor asked, not quite picking up the thread.
“Against whom are you holding something?” the woman asked. She seemed to want to play with her, even flirt, and feeling slightly panicked, Eleanor excused herself and left.
Mrs. Crosby had arrived. Back in the main gallery, Eleanor found her aunt standing with Robert.
“I seem to have got here just in time to leave,” Mrs. Crosby said. “Robert tells me we ought to get to the station. Just let me put down my guinea for one of the paintings. The townscape with laundry, I believe. If that’s laundry. Of course, once it’s our painting, we can decide for ourselves.”
“If,” Eleanor said, taking her aunt’s arm as she turned, “you don’t mind putting down something for me as well, for one of Kate’s paintings? The one of the little boy.”
A brief hiatus as they went to look at Kate’s work, crowding silently into the anteroom.
“You’ll notice my niece is loyal,” Mrs. Crosby told Robert, embarrassing Eleanor with her insistent matchmaking. “And expensive,” she added, taking out her purse.
Robert had stored his kit at Victoria Station, planning to catch the late train to Folkestone. He’d spend the night there before picking up an early morning transport across the Channel. Her aunt had kept a cab waiting outside the gallery and they set off immediately. Eleanor found herself back to monosyllables in Mrs. Crosby’s company and Robert was worse, brooding and silent. The streets were empty and coloured a strange medicinal blue by the covered street lamps as anti-aircraft guns boomed from the Heath. The weird desertion of central London meant the trip went quickly but seemed long and fraught. Eleanor was conscious of her last minutes with Robert ticking away. Her last for now, she corrected herself. At least when they arrived at Victoria, Mrs. Crosby said she would wait in the cab.
“I won’t say goodbye, Captain Denholm, but à bientôt,” her aunt said, an odd echo of something that Eleanor couldn’t quite remember, one of so many echoes lately.
Inside the station, Eleanor hurried behind Robert as he marched to collect his kit from Left Luggage. He had to elbow a path through a crowd heavy with khaki, many home leaves ending, boys heading south to cross the Channel. Afterwards, burdened with his kit, he elbowed another path to the platform. They stood together awkwardly, not as close as Eleanor would have liked. The train was already in the station and the platform milling with families and sweethearts saying goodbye. Eleanor found the other figures as faint as the soldiers in David’s paintings, not quite in focus and oddly silent despite the hubbub, which seemed to mutter above her head. She badly wanted to say something but didn’t know what. Robert didn’t seem able to speak, either. Finally Eleanor dared herself to put a hand on his chest, feeling the rough wool of his tunic on her palm.
“That painting of Kate’s,” she said, insisting on meeting his eyes. “I see the little boy as being . . . ours. The son we haven’t had, not yet. And if things go as badly as they can, the one we might never have. Because you see, I’ll always have him, to think of you, and this day with you. But I would . . . I’d like it terribly,” she said, trying not to cry, “if you’d come back.”
His arms flew around her and they kissed. Eleanor hadn’t known it was like this, but she also did. She felt nothing but his warmth as the train started up beside them: the chuff of steam, a mechanical screech, the flight of panicked pigeons from the rafters. There was a rush to board and jocular comments—“All right, me lad, leave us through”—until Robin finally pulled away. They met each other’s eyes and held them until the last minute, when he lifted his kit and jumped onto the train as it was pulling out, standing in the open door to wave goodbye. Eleanor couldn’t make herself run after him as some girls ran after their beaus, instead watching him until he, too, was a figure from one of David’s paintings: distant, half obscured by clouds of smoke and steam, disappearing, tiny, gone.