The return of the Ward family in September brought no immediate change in the weather. The grass on Knavesmire was bleached white and the temperatures were stifling, day and night, despite the imminent arrival of autumn.
‘It’s like a hell-hole in here,’ Elsie complained while she was making the first Sunday roast after the family’s return. ‘And it isn’t even as though anyone has much of an appetite for food when it’s so hot outside.’ Even the pantry, normally the coolest place in the house, had gradually warmed up over the course of the heatwave. Elsie struggled to keep the milk and meat from going off, and the butter from turning rancid. She was very grateful when Mrs Ward decreed that cooking should be kept to a minimum for the time being, while the heat persisted.
While John had been away, his father had decided that it was high time for him to experience the world of work. Reasoning that it would be better for him to learn to stand on his own two feet rather than start in the family business straight away, he had found him a position with Grey & Partners, a firm of solicitors where John would become their most junior clerk. He had started during his first week back at home and Ella had admired his smart appearance as he set off each morning, perspiring even at that early hour in a starched white shirt and dark suit. At the end of the first week she asked him how it had gone.
John’s face fell. ‘I can’t begin to think how I will get through to the end of next week, let alone see out a full year. I seem to have no aptitude for the work.’ Then his face brightened. ‘Mr Grey does at least have a tolerably pretty daughter, Marion. She calls by the office most days; it’s the only thing that makes it all worthwhile.’
When Ella reported this conversation to Beth she snorted in derision. It troubled Ella that two of the key people in her life seemed to have an antipathy towards each other. They were happy to operate a policy of healthy avoidance, however, and life settled into a new rhythm at Grange House. John was working hard at the solicitors, although Ella suspected this might have more to do with trying to make a good impression on Marion than wanting to impress either her father or his own. John remained closer to Ella, who was fiercely proud of him, than to his own mother and turned to her frequently for guidance when he was troubled. He was struggling to find ways to shine in Marion’s eyes outside of work though, and a little less than a year after taking up his position, he confessed to Ella that he was at a loss as to how to go about it.
Marion was two years older than John and about to turn twenty-one, an age when a young lady of her class might generally expect to become engaged and then married within the year. Ella felt John had grown into a fine young man, and that any young lady of social standing in York should be proud to be the object of his affections. Ella wondered why John didn’t put himself forward as a suitor.
‘It’s not that easy,’ John said despairingly. He ran his hands through his hair until it was standing up on end and began to pace the floor of the sewing room, where he had found Ella. ‘She’s made it clear that she feels I am too young and, on top of that, it seems I’m not suitable.’
Ella was puzzled. ‘But your father is one of the most well-respected businessmen in York. And one of the wealthiest – just look at this house.’ She spread her arms wide to encompass its solid respectability. ‘How can that pose a problem?’
‘It’s because he’s seen as having a trade, rather than a profession,’ John said ruefully. ‘He’s a self-made man, whereas Mr Grey is from a legal family, a long line of solicitors, judges and lawyers stretching back I don’t know how long. And university educated, too.’
Ella reflected. The strangeness and intricacies of the class system still sometimes eluded her; the boundaries, though invisible, might as well have been high stone walls. From the point of view of appearance, manners and wealth, John should have been perfect. He was tall and good-looking, his skin tanned and his fair hair bleached blond by the sun. He excelled at sport, too; tennis and riding having now replaced his favourite school sports of rugby and running.
‘Perhaps, although it feels to you as though Marion is the right one for you, she doesn’t feel the same way?’ she suggested gently. ‘Could it be that if she has any feelings towards you at all, she considers you more like a brother? She seems very close to her father. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she ended up marrying a man rather older than herself.’
Ella’s words were to prove prophetic. Within the year, Marion was engaged to one of the partners in the law firm, a man a good ten years her senior. John was heartbroken and Ella would have given anything to spare him some of the pain. He became pale and thin, the dark circles under his eyes attesting to nights of broken sleep. Ella’s heart went out to him: although many years had passed since she had believed there might be something between Albert and herself, she could still remember the hope and then the heartbreak of that time. John struggled on, determined that no one except Ella should have reason to suspect the cause of his distress. As 1913 became 1914, Ella suggested that he should talk to his father about joining the family firm, as much to break the proximity with Marion and her new husband as anything else.
‘You’ve got over two years’ business experience behind you now, so you can join your father’s business with your head held high and something to offer,’ she counselled him. John could see the sense in her suggestion, but a part of him couldn’t bear to cut the ties and break all contact with Marion, even though the relationship was futile and a source of more pain than pleasure. So he dithered and hung on at Grey & Partners, indulging in a form of private and exquisite torture for another year until Fate chose to intervene.
In the meantime, as the months passed, the country moved towards involvement in war in Europe with a series of fits and starts, as government assurances that diplomacy had saved the day and that the situation between Austria and Serbia was under control suddenly, and irrevocably, proved to have no foundation. In early August, before Ella and Beth had time to recognise the full importance of what was going on, with a burst of patriotic fervour the country found itself at war.