Edward had hit her again. After that first push in his study, which she had not questioned but had covered over with make-up and a smile, after the humiliation in the drawing room that she had not called him on, he had seemed strengthened in his resolve. She hated herself for not doing more, for not hitting back or shouting or scratching or screaming, but each time it happened was when the boys were there. She was weak, she was pathetic, but when they were in the house, how could she let them see that this was what their father had become? And that was the point that confounded her. What had he become; and what part had she played in that?
Weeks would pass, a bruise would fade then an argument flare up when she questioned Edward about their finances, about his erratic behaviour, and then another month would have gone by and Jean would stop, some glimpse of sky or a bird wheeling overhead would pull her out of herself, and she would wonder how much more she could endure; how long this strange half-life could continue. Another spring came; a summer passed, panic always beating its moth wings within her; the boys came home, Edward was away for large periods of time, and Jean began to question herself, her resilience; to wonder over and over what life this was she was living.
And then it was that morning in September and everyone was standing around the wireless; all the servants were called into the drawing room, Stokes going round the house, pulling them off whatever task was at hand, his face solemn as the grave. They were gathered around the small wooden box, a household as one, rank and class dissolved as together they heard Chamberlain’s words of bitter disappointment crackling across the sun-filled room; heard his deep regret, a personal failure, his sadness that the nation was once more – too soon – at war.
She looked around at all those faces, pinched and drawn. The uncertainty of the preceding months had been lost on none of them. Hitler had flouted each agreement, each concession, till there was no excuse left that could be made for him. Grim-faced, they took stock as the inevitable became the actual. She saw Mrs Hawkins, face tight, hands clasped together as she held herself at bay, feeling her son of twenty already pulled away from her; saw one of the kitchen girls, pinafore dusted with flour, hands red from where she’d just scrubbed them clean, the little band of gold at her finger no longer a promise of happiness but a threat of loss. Jean’s mind went to her boys: please, God, too young, too young. She looked to Edward, whose youth had excused him from bravery in the last war; what would be required of him now, a man of nearly forty? But as she scanned the room, scanned the faces of those men and women whose calmness and courage their prime minister now called upon, he wasn’t there.
Edward didn’t appear for another hour, not at lunch, nor the hour after, as Harehope lurched into action, trying to make sense of the list of duties now asked of each household: gas masks, blackouts, things that seemed so alien on a cloudless Sunday afternoon. She went to the stables to find him but was told that he had gone out riding after church with a couple of the lads and hadn’t returned yet.
And it was then that Jack, the youngest of the stable boys, ran into the yard, his cheeks scarlet, hair plastered to his head with sweat, clutching his cap in his hand. ‘He’s fallen, m’lady. Lewis has stayed with him, but he’s not moving. The horse bucked and he went over him and landed so awkward. Lewis told me to come back here and call for the doctor.’
Jean telephoned for the doctor as if in a dream. She was driven out in silence to the place where the fall had happened. It was his horse she saw first, tied to a gate in the corner of the field, one leg crooked awkwardly with no weight on it, pulling its head back in distress. She got out of the car and walked along the lane, flanked with high hedgerows still thick with cornflowers; she entered the field where the gate was held open by Lewis, cap in hand, his head bowed. She walked on through the wet grass, the sun at her back, the beauty of Eden stretched out before her. There had been a massive thunderstorm the night before, a month’s rain falling in a matter of hours, and the ground was soft beneath her feet. She walked on, though she felt no contact with the earth, and then something inside her gave when she saw him: Edward, pale and prone and somehow so tidy and precise against the dark, smeared ground beneath him.
She knelt by him and instinctively put her hand to his face. His skin was cold and flaccid, and she felt a surge of nausea. It wasn’t him. Where had he gone – where had all that anger and hate gone? She heard the doctor’s car on the lane behind the hedge and she stood in a cloud of confusion as he told her that Edward’s neck had broken on hitting the ground, that he had died immediately, would have felt no pain. Still she stood, the September sun warm on her face as her husband of seventeen years was pronounced dead, words funnelled to a mind lost beneath a blanket of shock.
Jean sat in the hall later, shoes black with mud that was now caked and dry, the telephone receiver in her hand. She had to tell Alice. Her mother-in-law received the news with only a momentary release of control. Jean heard her exhale, a strange dart of air, then she let out a strangled cry somewhere between a moan and a growl. She gathered herself almost immediately. ‘I see. How awful. I see. I must tell Charlotte at once.’ And then with a click she was gone, leaving Jean alone in the silence of her house, on a day when the whole country was stunned into silence, to work out how to tell her boys. The irony was not lost on her that once again her husband had missed his chance to fight for King and country.
While the house came to terms with the news – how strange, how unreal, she knew they all thought as they waded through this day of double calamity, the nation and Harehope’s fortunes aligned – Stokes set about discreetly removing the day-to-day detritus of Edward’s life from his home. There were his cigarettes left on the side of a table, his cap by the door, his jacket flung on a sofa, a book left half-open on a side table, his fingers having only just left the page. And a dress of black bouclé was laid out for Jean to put on: the costume for her next incarnation.
As she unclipped the diamonds at her ear, slipped out of her skirt and stepped into the shift of black, she saw herself in the looking glass. A widow, in the discreet uniform of mourning, at the age of thirty-eight: too young, she would hear people say, too young to lose a husband in his prime. But what could they know of the chaos, of the tangle of emotions that lay beneath? Regret, a sadness so bitter she could taste it; a flare of relief that he was gone, chased by hounds of self-loathing for feeling it; images of what she had done to him, memories of what he had done to her. The mess and ugliness of it all, now dressed up as something that would be written about in obituaries, talked of in London clubs, passed around in polite did-you-hears around the county to ease the mutterings of a truth that hung in the air, almost undetectable but there nonetheless, that all had not been quite as it seemed.
The funeral that followed was small. Everything was so strange during the weeks and months that followed Chamberlain’s announcement. The Bore War, people took to calling it, when no one was quite sure how to behave, when everything and nothing had changed. England had been expecting German bombers to come streaking through the sky, raining death and destruction as they’d seen in The Shape of Things to Come. But that hadn’t happened, and life had carried on much as before. There was a small service at the family chapel, the promise of a larger memorial in London that would never materialise. Edward’s mother invited neighbours but not tenants, any family who would travel, and of course the boys, brought up from school. Alfie and George – hair cut short, best coats on – stood beside Jean as Edward’s coffin was lowered into the ground next to the graves of his brother and father, their young heads bowed, their hands clasped in front, so close their shoulders were touching.
As the straggle of mourners picked their path slowly through the sodden ground back to the house, Jean sensed the hesitation in Alfie as he politely shook the hands of well-wishers and estate workers who had lined the way between the chapel and the house. They tipped their caps or bobbed a curtsy as he passed, and she was momentarily confused until she realised that the page had already turned, the blank one smoothed and ready, ink poised to mark it, for the new Lord Warre. Alfie, in suit and tie, shoes shining and hair combed, had been unsure of how to respond, the crown not yet fitting, shoulders too narrow to carry the weight of expectation.
The boys cried that night, tears they tried to hide, muffled into pillows, but she went to them, sat with them, stroked their heads in the strange, forced dark of the blackout, until they drifted off, the soothing touch somehow making her feel real again. She knew that their grief, like hers, was a conflicted one. For a father who had shown no warmth or affection, who had seemed repulsed by George and enraged by Alfie, for reasons they could never understand. Theirs were tears of confusion, of guilt, of shame, but not of loss. Because how you could you be bereft of something that had never really been yours?
And Jean? The weeks of shock receded, fading into months of public mourning and private regret. But in the bleeding light between dreams and wakefulness, there began to form in her mind a name. It was still only a question, a possibility as fine as gauze, as intangible as the mist at dawn that rolled across the park as she stood in her dressing gown, looking out from her bedroom window, from a house that now felt, as she did, nomadic, rudderless.
David. Of course. It was David.