December 7, 1941
Over the past few months, Ruby had gotten into the habit of sitting with Vanessa and Jessie in the library after dinner. It was smaller and cozier than the sitting room, and it also held the wireless, as Ruby had come to think of it, in its grand wooden case.
That Sunday evening, Vi had been absent from dinner; she’d been performing at a Christmas party for factory workers somewhere north of the city. Beatrice left by eight, for she had an early start in the morning, and Jessie had gone off to bed complaining of a sore back.
That had left Ruby and Vanessa alone in the library, quietly knitting and listening to the rather feeble programming the BBC supplied on Sunday evenings—church services, hymns, improving lectures, and the like. Ruby had turned down the wireless earlier, not caring for the nasal tones and banal remarks of the clergyman who’d been rambling away for the past quarter hour; but as the clock chimed nine she returned the volume to its normal level so they might listen to the evening news.
“Here is the news, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it.”
“Don’t you love that voice? ‘Here is the news,’” Vanessa intoned, mimicking the newsreader perfectly. “Can you imagine a plummier voice? It sounds as if he gargles with vintage port every—”
“Shh, Vanessa. Something’s happened . . .” Ruby turned up the volume even higher, straining to hear.
“. . . attacks on United States naval bases in the Pacific . . .”
“My God,” Vanessa gasped. “Can it be true?”
“. . . from Tokyo say that Japan has issued a formal declaration of war against both the United States and Britain. The Japanese air raids were made on the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines. Observers’ reports say that an American battleship has been hit and that a number of the Japanese bombers have been shot down . . .”
“When did this happen?”
“It’s happening now, Vanessa—hush!”
“. . . Roosevelt has told the army and navy to act on their secret orders, has called a meeting of ministers, and is preparing a report for Congress. In London, Mr. Winant has seen Mr. Churchill and both houses of Parliament have been summoned for tomorrow afternoon to hear a statement on the situation. In further news . . .”
Her fingers suddenly nerveless, Ruby let her knitting slip to the floor, grabbing for it just in time to feel an entire row of stitches pop off the needles. Clutching the tangled bundle to her chest, she stared sightlessly at the wireless. Could she have imagined it?
“‘Further news,’” Vanessa muttered, switching off the wireless. “Unless Axis troops are landing in Kent, I doubt anything else can be of interest tonight.”
It was so hard to believe. Tensions had been running high between the United States and Japan, but she’d never have imagined this. And for Japan to have declared war on Britain, too, was almost impossible to credit.
“What are you thinking?” Vanessa asked softly.
“That I can’t quite believe it, I guess. We’re at war with Japan, and probably with Germany, too. We’ll be fighting a war on two fronts, on opposite sides of the world. And yet . . .”
“Go on.”
“I feel relieved. Isn’t that awful? To be glad that my country is at war? And I’m not, not really. But to know that we’re your ally now, and that Britain isn’t alone, is such a relief. After all this time, after all this country has endured . . .”
“Well, nothing much is going to happen overnight,” Vanessa said. “Put aside your knitting and go on up to bed. Kaz will have you run off your feet tomorrow, so you’d best get some sleep now.”
Vanessa was right. Kaz threw out half the magazine in the morning, sent them off in search of new stories, and completely rewrote his editorial. The final proofs went out the door on Tuesday a few minutes shy of midnight, but then, exhausted as they all were, Kaz insisted they be back at their desks by eight o’clock the following morning.
Emil proved his worth many times over in those busy days of early December. Not only was he an astute and sensitive editor, but he was also an elegant writer. He worked harder than everyone else, staying late nearly every night. When Ruby tried to encourage him to go home on time, he always demurred, explaining that there was nowhere else he’d rather be.
“I’m simply making up for lost time,” he explained. “When I was trapped in that internment camp, prevented from doing any meaningful work and bored out of my mind, I promised myself that if I was ever released, I would never let an idle hour pass by again. I intend to keep that promise.”
The news kept coming, and it seemed to get worse every day, so much so that Ruby longed for just one solid day, even a single waking hour, when she might be free of it. When she might empty her mind and simply daydream about Christmas dinner and gathered friends and a bright future for all of them. When the awful period of waiting and wondering might be over, and she and the rest of the world might be confident of what would happen next.
INSTEAD OF HAVING everyone come to Vanessa’s for Christmas, Uncle Harry had suggested they travel out to the house in Edenbridge for luncheon. It would make a pleasant change of scenery, he had argued in his letter to Vanessa, and it would also save her and Jessie the burden of cooking for everyone.
With the trains running often enough to make a day-trip practicable, it was agreed that everyone would meet at Victoria Station on Christmas morning, Jessie having gone to her sister’s in Wapping the day before. Bea appeared promptly at ten o’clock, as agreed, but Vi surprised no one by being late.
“What time did you tell Vi to meet us?” asked Bea for at least the third time. “You ought to have said a quarter to ten,” she went on, not waiting for her mother to answer.
“She’ll be here,” Vanessa insisted. “And she’s a grown girl. If she misses the train, she can catch up later. Stop fussing about it.”
So they waited and checked their watches and scanned the crowds, and just as the station’s clocks began to ring the quarter hour, Ruby caught sight of a familiar face. She stood on tiptoe, craning her head this way and that, wishing the crowds would thin just a little.
“I think I see her—yes, there she is,” she confirmed.
Vi was dressed in the nicest of her suits, its dove-gray color the perfect foil for her brunette hair and bright blue eyes, and she had on a new hat that Ruby hadn’t seen before, a jaunty little cap that looked a bit like something a sailor might wear. She strode through the station as if it belonged to her, and she was so beautiful, so impossibly glamorous, that passersby were stopping and staring and whispering behind their hands.
“There you are, Vi!” Bea called out. “We were starting to worry.”
“Well, I made it, so no need to fuss. Happy Christmas, all of you. Where are Kaz and Bennett? It won’t be the same if they aren’t there, too.”
“If you’d listened to me when we spoke on the telephone earlier in the week, you’d know the men are there already. Now let’s hurry up—if we miss our train we’ll have to wait another hour, and you know how Harry hates it when luncheon is late.”
“Do Kaz and Bennett always spend Christmas with your family?” Ruby asked once they were under way.
“Nearly always. The first Christmas he was at university, Bennett asked if he might bring a friend,” Vanessa explained. “Kaz’s parents had gone to live abroad, I believe, and he’d nowhere else to go. He’s come for Christmas every year since.”
“And Bennett?”
“Him, too. His mother died when he was only thirteen. She was my dearest friend, you know. And then his father died only a few years later.”
“How did you meet Mrs. Bennett?”
“We attended the same finishing school in Switzerland, and we bonded over our mutual dislike of all the other girls. Terrible snobs, all of them. When I returned to England at the end of the year, she came for a visit. That’s when she and David—Bennett’s father—met, and it was love at first sight. Never mind that they ought to have been all wrong for one another.”
“Why should that be?” Ruby asked.
“Well, she was French, to begin with, and very high-spirited and romantic and given to grand gestures. And he was exactly as you’d imagine a very senior barrister to be. Terribly traditional and fond of hearing his own voice, and not one to suffer fools gladly. But they were happy together, and he was simply devastated when she died. We all were.”
“And Bennett?”
“My husband and I took him under our collective wing. He needed attention, which his father wasn’t able to give him for some time, and he needed a place to be a boy. He found that here, and also in Edenbridge with his uncle Harry. In due course his father recovered, and they were close again, but then the poor man keeled over from some sort of undiagnosed heart ailment.”
“What was he like when he was young? Bennett, I mean.”
“He was ever so funny,” said Bea, giggling a little at the memory. “Remember how he would make us all laugh with the stories he told?”
“He did have me in stitches most of the time. And he was terribly naughty. Forever getting into trouble at school. His father would be so stern, and Bennett would promise he was sorry, but there was always that light in his eyes that promised more mischief to come.”
“I guess he changed when his father died,” Ruby said, unable to reconcile the Bennett she knew with the laughing, merry boy he had once been.
But Vanessa was shaking her head. “No, even that didn’t alter him much.”
“Then what—”
“It was Dunkirk. That’s when he changed. That’s when we lost the old Bennett.” She sighed, and then she straightened her shoulders and aimed a dazzling smile at Ruby. “Oh—listen to me being so gloomy, and on Christmas morning, too. Let’s talk of nicer things. Vi, why don’t you tell us where you’ve been performing. Have you been anywhere interesting recently?”
“Do the Cambridgeshire Fens count as interesting? Because that’s where I was all week.”
Vi’s description of her rainy trek from one sodden airfield to the next kept them entertained through their change of trains in East Croydon and their arrival, not long after, in Edenbridge Town. They were the only passengers to alight in the village, which was so quiet as to appear deserted.
“Not far now,” Vanessa assured Ruby. “We used to make this trip nearly every bank holiday, didn’t we?”
“It felt faster when Papa had the car,” Beatrice observed.
“Yes, but then we didn’t have the fun of the walk up to the house. We’re taking the back way. The main entrance is all the way around to the north, but there’s a path just ahead that takes us through the woods to the bottom of the gardens.”
“We’ll have to bring you back in the summer,” Vi added, catching hold of Ruby’s arm and urging her along. “It smells like heaven when the roses and clematis and lavender are in bloom. Absolute heaven.”
“Have you met Uncle Harry before?” Bea asked Ruby.
“Just the once. He came to PW when Kaz began his leave of absence. I didn’t have much of a chance to speak with him, though.”
“You’ll like him,” Vanessa declared. “Dear old fellow. Although you’d never know he was once a high court judge. All he talks about now is his rhododendrons and azaleas.”
They came up to the top of a little hill, and there was the house itself, an ancient, rather shambling structure that exactly conformed to every one of Ruby’s preconceived notions of what an English cottage should look like. Its slate roof was thick with moss, and hung low over a half-timbered upper story. The main floor was made of brick, soft and rosy, with short runs of a dark gray stone at intervals, and its windows and doors were set into the exterior in a charmingly haphazard fashion. There wasn’t, at least as far as Ruby could see, a completely straight line in the entire building.
Closer to the house, the garden had been planted out as a vegetable patch, its dormant beds flanked by rows of elegantly skeletal fruit trees. A stone bench sat in a patch of pale winter sunshine under one of the trees; and stretched upon it, fast asleep, was Bennett.
“I’ll wake him,” she said. “The rest of you go on inside.”
It seemed a shame to rouse him. His face was so peaceful, the lines around his eyes and the deeper groove between his brows smoothed out by the calm of sleep. But he wouldn’t want to miss the party and the chance of seeing them all together, not after being absent for so long.
“Bennett,” she said, crouching by the bench. “It’s Ruby. Time to wake up. Will you wake up for me?”
He opened his eyes, instantly alert, and then, hesitantly, as if she might shy away, he reached out to trace the curve of her cheek. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a dryad come to steal me away,” he said huskily.
“A dryad?”
“A tree spirit. Although no self-respecting dryad would be caught wearing a cardigan.”
“It’s winter. My swansdown cape isn’t nearly warm enough.”
“I thought so,” he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon.”
He sat up, stretching his arms behind his back. “We’d better go on in. Harry will start tearing up the floorboards if we don’t sit down to lunch soon.”
Standing, he looped his arm through hers, and led her around to the front of the house.
“Has Harry always lived here?” she asked.
“Since he retired. This was actually my father’s house.”
She stopped short, surprised by his admission. “And it’s Harry’s now?”
“Well, no, not exactly. I inherited it, but I’m happy for him to live here. It leaves him free to spend his money on other things.”
“Such as Picture Weekly?”
“Just so.”
They went inside through a wide, heavy door of wood gone nearly black with age, and into a simply furnished hall awash in boots, Barbour jackets, and dogs of all shapes and sizes, all barking and yipping with joy at their arrival.
“I’m here, I’m here,” Bennett crooned. “Time to settle. Calm down, calm . . . calm . . . there you are. Say hello to Ruby. Come on, now.”
She held out her hand, a little nervous as she’d never spent much time around dogs, and one by one they came over to sniff and lick at her fingers. “What are their names?”
“Let me see. The old yellow Lab is Tilly, and the younger version is Joey. The terrier is Dougal, the lurcher—this odd-looking fellow with the shaggy coat and long legs—is Mickey. And this one”—here he bent to pick up a rotund little dachshund—“is Spitz. Not a German spy, I assure you, despite his name.”
“Why so many?” she asked, stroking Spitz’s long, silky ears.
“Harry is incapable of turning away a stray or the runt of a litter. At one point I think he had ten dogs living here, but in recent years I’ve been encouraging him to find other homes for dogs as they’re brought to him.”
“I like them,” she said. “Spitz especially. Even if he does look like a ham with four legs.”
“You go ahead while I put the dogs outside. Otherwise we won’t have a moment’s peace during lunch.”
Following the sound of conversation, Ruby wandered down the hall and into the sitting room, a modest chamber with an enormous open hearth as its focal point. In its decoration, the room reminded her of Vanessa’s house, with well-worn easy chairs, polished antiques, and a gallery’s worth of oil paintings hung closely on every vertical surface.
Their host heaved himself to his feet as she entered. “Ruby, my dear. How good to see you again.”
“Happy Christmas, sir. Your house is beautiful.”
“Did you meet the dogs?”
“I did, and they were very sweet.”
“I just spoke to Cook, and she said lunch will be ready in an hour,” Bennett announced from the door. “Do any of you mind if I show Ruby around the house before we open our gifts?”
“Not at all,” Harry insisted. “We’ll just have a little aperitif while we’re waiting. Kaz, would you mind doing the honors? It’s the last bottle of Pol Roger from my cellar.”
Bennett led Ruby back the way they’d come, through the sitting room and the dining room, past several smaller chambers, one of which looked to be Harry’s library or study, and up a narrow, creaking staircase.
“How old is the house?” she asked.
“The oldest parts are from the early fifteenth century. It’s a bit of a jumble, as I’m sure you noticed.”
“So what? I think it’s charming.” They’d reached the landing and were at the end of a long and very crooked hallway.
“Up to a point. If you only knew the number of times I’ve cracked my forehead open on beams in this house. I probably have a dent in my skull,” he grumbled.
Laughing, she touched her fingertips to his brow, sweeping them back and forth, as if to check for evidence of past injuries. His eyes met hers, and she noticed, once again, how very blue they were, like India ink straight from the bottle.
Her hand fell away.
He took a step back and cleared his throat. “Let me show you around.”
The full tour took a long while, for Bennett was intent on showing her everything: from medieval graffiti scratched on a pane of stained glass, to the adze marks left by carpenters shaping the ceiling joists more than five centuries ago, to the loose floorboard in his childhood bedroom where he’d once stowed all manner of treasures.
“How long did you live here?”
“Only until I was thirteen. After Maman died, we returned to London and Harry took over the house. I visit on holidays, but I haven’t lived here for a long time.”
“Do you think you’ll ever live here again?” she asked, though it wasn’t any of her business.
He looked around his old room, its furniture hidden under dust sheets, and shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s hard to look ahead any farther than a few weeks. But it was a good place to be a boy. If I ever . . .”
“If?”
“Never mind. We’d better get back to the others.”
After learning they would be traveling out to Edenbridge for Christmas lunch, Ruby had knitted scarves for the men with wool she’d scavenged from some old cashmere cardigans that Vanessa had unearthed. They pronounced themselves delighted with her creations, as did Vanessa and her daughters with the delicate lace shawls she’d knitted from the unraveled remains of a fine lamb’s-wool dressing gown that had once belonged to Sir Nicholas. In return, and rather to her surprise, she received an automatic pencil from Kaz, a diamanté brooch from Vanessa, a bottle of Sauternes dessert wine from Harry, and a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls from Vi and Beatrice.
The last gift she opened was from Bennett, and it all but took her breath away. It was a small oil painting, not much bigger than a sheet of typing paper, and it was a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral from the banks of the Thames, the great dome almost lost in the mist of a rainy day.
“I think the artist must have been standing on Blackfriars Bridge,” Bennett explained. “But he painted it before the railway bridge went up, so that puts the painting at 1850 or earlier. The dealer wasn’t able to tell me much more, and we couldn’t make much of the signature. All the same, I hope you like it.”
“I do. Very much.” There was so much more she could have said, but not without embarrassing them both. “Thank you.”
With the gifts unwrapped, it was time for luncheon, so they trooped into the dining room and took their places around the expansive table. Its polished wood had been left bare, with lace mats in lieu of a cloth, and at its center a mass of chrysanthemums had been gathered into a sparkling crystal vase. Heavy silver flatware flanked blue-and-white china at each place setting, and appetizing smells floated from covered serving dishes.
Harry had laid in a sumptuous feast: roast pheasant, sent by a cousin with a shooting lodge in Scotland, roast potatoes, and brussels sprouts, which Cook had prepared with what looked like a year’s ration of bacon. To finish, there was plum pudding made with grated apples and carrots and a handful of precious raisins, and set aflame with a dribble of brandy that Bennett had discovered at the very back of the drinks cabinet.
“Now eat up,” Vanessa encouraged everyone, “or we’ll miss the king’s message.”
At three o’clock they gathered around the wireless in the sitting room, everyone standing in accordance with Harry’s wishes. “In my day you didn’t sit to listen to the sovereign. You stood, and you toasted the man when he was done.”
“We will, Harry. Now hush so we can hear.”
So they stood and listened, and each time the king hesitated over a word they held their collective breath, but he got through his speech without too much difficulty. Ruby couldn’t remember how she had learned about his stammer and his work to overcome it, but whatever measures he had taken seemed to have worked.
“You don’t think he writes the speech himself, do you?” she asked.
Kaz shook his head. “Doubt it. Probably has some equerry do the job.”
“I thought it was lovely,” Vanessa said.
“You always say that, Mama. And you always say he was ever so brave, and didn’t he manage well, and so on.”
“Enough, Bea.” This was from Bennett. “Your mother is right. It was a good speech, and the king did well by it. Did you notice the allusions to ‘Dover Beach,’ though?”
Kaz groaned. “You and your poetry.”
“‘Nor fortitude, nor sacrifice, nor sympathy’? It’s as plain as day.”
“What poem are you talking about, Bennett?” Ruby asked, not caring if it made her look like the most ignorant person alive.
“‘Dover Beach.’ Written almost a hundred years ago, though Matthew Arnold might have been talking about the present war. Listen—here’s the last few lines:
“. . . let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
“How wonderfully festive of you,” Vanessa observed, and Bennett, looking a little embarrassed now, did a mock bow. They were saved from further awkwardness by the timely delivery of mincemeat tarts and tea. Only after everyone had been served, and a single pie remained on the platter, did Ruby notice that Bennett had vanished.
“Did you see where Bennett went?” she asked Kaz.
“Likely the garden. If not there, then the library.”
She found him in the same spot he’d been when they’d arrived, sitting on the bench, a nimbus of cigarette smoke hanging around his head. In all the time she’d known him, she’d never seen him smoke or smelled it on his clothes. For some reason it disappointed her, even though half the people she knew were smokers.
“Since when do you smoke?” she asked.
“Hardly ever,” he said. “It’s a nasty habit I thought I’d left behind years ago.” He dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it beneath his heel. “Vanessa will have my head if she finds out. It’s what killed Uncle Nick, you know. Poor man was dead in six months. That’s when I stopped for the first time.”
“I have to agree with Vanessa,” she said as she sat next to him. “Any length of time sitting with smokers and I feel ill.”
He turned to grin at her. “I’d no idea you were such a delicate flower, Miss Sutton.”
“Why are you out here?”
His smile vanished. “I am forever misjudging the mood of the hour. I love that poem, but it was idiotic of me to recite it like that. As if anyone needs a reminder of how grim our lives have become.”
“I wouldn’t say it was idiotic. Although the king’s message was perhaps a touch more hopeful than your poem.”
“You would think that,” he muttered. “You writers are all dreamers at heart.”
He tilted his head back, as did she, and together they surveyed the infinite dome of stars blanketing the night sky.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it? How insignificant we are. How little our cares and worries mean to the universe. We’re specks of dust, and all our dreams . . .”
“What of them?” she whispered.
“They come to nothing, don’t they? As all dreams must. I . . .”
She waited and waited, the silence between them stretching tighter than a bowstring, until she couldn’t bear another second of it.
“When are you off again?” she asked. A stupid question, since the answer was sure to be some variation of “soon.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Will you be back for New Year’s? Vanessa was so hoping you—”
“I doubt it.”
“Is what you do dangerous?”
“Don’t do this. Please, Ruby.”
“I’m not asking what you do. Only if I ought to worry.”
“I’m not worth your worry. Swear to God I’m not.”
She reached out, through the dark night that separated them, and set her hand on his knee. “It’s not your decision to make. You can’t stop me from worrying.”
“I suppose not.”
“What do you think is going to happen now?” she asked, letting her hand fall back onto her lap.
At last he twisted around to face her. “Now, as in this evening? Or now, as in the foreseeable future?”
“The latter.”
“I’ve no idea. Only that the war won’t end next year, or even the year after. The rot I’ve heard over the past few weeks—as if it’ll be a cakewalk from here on in. As if we’ll be walking through Berlin by the summer.”
“I never thought—”
“If ever we do get a real toehold in Europe, we will have to fight for every yard, every inch of ground. The years to come will be drenched in blood, and we haven’t even begun to plumb the horrors of what is happening to civilians in Axis territory. That article you ran in PW about the Nazis’ euthanasia scheme was only the tip of the iceberg. If I told you all I know, you would never sleep again.”
“Bennett—it’s Christmas,” she pleaded, her heart aching for him. Could he not let the weight of the world slip from his shoulders, if only for a few short hours?
“I know, I know. But how can I find it in me to be cheery, knowing what I know? How am I meant to care that smoking will kill me twenty years from now?”
“I care,” she whispered. “And there are things to be cheerful about.”
“Name one.”
“Christmas puddings that taste almost like the real thing. Hand-knit scarves. A sky bright with stars. Friends that love you.”
“Don’t. Just . . . don’t.”
It was hard to answer him, after that, without her voice wobbling. “I won’t, then. But Merry Christmas. Happy Christmas, I mean.”
He didn’t answer her right away, and simply to sit there and wait and wonder what was going through his head was unbearable. She stood, ready to flee to the warmth and certainty of the sitting room and their waiting friends, but his hand upon her sleeve stopped her.
“Ruby—wait. I’m sorry.”
He rose to his feet and kissed her fleetingly, fitting his lips to hers for the length of a heartbeat, no more. “Happy Christmas,” he whispered.
Then he was gone, past the blackout curtain and into the house, and she was alone in the garden, sheltered only by stars, her world turned upside down.