Nicholas Anatov had discovered the pictures that his mother kept in the exquisite nephrite box on her dressing table many years before he was old enough for their possible significance to occur to him. Always indulged by his mother he had been given – or more exactly had assumed – the right of open access to her room at a very early age and, since there was little either in the boy’s nature or in his upbringing to impel constraint or respect for the privacy of others, he had long taken that to mean that anything that was Anna’s was naturally open to his inquisitive eyes and fingers. The pictures intrigued him – especially the portrait that had been torn and so carefully repaired. Something in the face fascinated him, and as a small child, when his mother was from home – for however confident he might be of her indulgence, prudence nevertheless dictated even to Nicholas that there might be some things best kept from her knowledge – he would creep to his mother’s room, spread the sketch carefully upon the dressing table, smoothing the paper, studying it, moving his head a little so that the warm, life-like eyes seemed to follow him, smiling. Clearly the same man featured in the other sketch and, too, he recognized his mother. He guessed that she had drawn both these pictures – for how often, throughout his childhood, had she not done similar sketches for him – sketches of a moment, or of a person that she could capture precisely and deftly with a few swift strokes of her pencil. Nicholas, in so far as his indulged and self-centred nature allowed, adored his mother. No one else’s mother could do what she could do. As no one else’s mother could draw every eye in a room simply by appearing in the doorway. Or design jewellery so exquisite that the insects and flowers she was so fond of incorporating into her pieces seemed to the dazzled child to be all but alive, arrested movement spellbound into precious metal and stone. At first it had been simply this that had fascinated him about the portrait: the clear, bright eyes, the expression that tempted him to believe that if he looked for long enough that half-smile might break into laughter. As he grew older, however, and a gracelessly inquisitive nature began to assert itself, he found other things to intrigue him about the pictures, not least the character of the damage to the portrait that his mother obviously valued so highly. It could not, he surmised, have been accidental: the tears, precisely across the centre, were too obviously and deliberately destructive for that. Yet the picture had been painstakingly mended – the four pieces pasted carefully upon two strong strips of paper – and undoubtedly by his mother, for where the damage had been irreparable she had used her pencil and her skill to cover it up. Even more intriguing were the words that were still decipherable on the back of the picture, in another hand than his mother’s: “Anna, August 1900”. Over the years, in those odd moments that the child chose to indulge his curiosity and take advantage of his undoubtedly privileged position – for neither his brother nor his sister would have dared enter their mother’s room without permission, let alone touch any of her things – the strong, scrawling writing became as familiar to him as did the face. The possible significance of the strange attraction for him of that face however did not remotely occur to him until one day in the winter of 1916, a few months before his sixteenth birthday and a few days before his sister Victoria was to marry her Samuel.
Dr Samuel Bottomley – tall, balding, sparingly built, painfully reserved and himself believing until a short while before that surely he must be by now immune to Cupid’s painful darts – had surprised himself, to say nothing of the rest of the world, by the determination with which he had set out to win the approval of the Anatov household for his intention to marry Victoria, having already with an equal effort of will convinced first Victoria and then his own sceptical family. Slow-spoken, kindly and a dedicated man of medicine – even Joss had been immediately impressed by the man, and no one who came within a mile of Victoria could have had any doubts as to her feelings for her Samuel. As to the difference in their ages – Dr Bottomley had impressed Joss further by admitting freely that just a few short months before he himself might have frowned upon such a suitor for his own daughter, who was nearly two years Victoria’s senior. It was, however, with no apology and irreproachable dignity that he finally made his formal request to Joss for his daughter’s hand, and Joss, impressed as much by this as by the man’s obvious deep attachment to Victoria, found himself acceding with little reluctance. In this day and age, after all, there was something to be said for the security and comfort to be found as the wife of an older man. Already it was becoming obvious that the flower of a generation of young men would never reach maturity. So it was with few misgivings on either side that the wedding date was fixed for the week before Christmas, 1916 – and so it was that Nicholas, on holiday from school and driven from the old nursery by his sister’s continuous and fluttering talk of dresses and guest lists and bridesmaids and the exigent pressures of wartime rationing upon the nuptial celebrations, strolled without knocking into his mother’s room and found her sitting at her dressing table, the nephrite box open, the portrait spread before her. At her son’s entrance she gave a palpable start of shock, her pale, startled eyes meeting his in the mirror with an expression that – had he not dismissed the notion immediately as ridiculous – he might have called fear. A little disconcerted at her obvious alarm, he took refuge in the charm that never failed him, and smiled his improbably brilliant smile.
“Hello Mumps. Mind if I join you for a bit? Victoria’s driving me barmy!” He spread graceful, long-fingered hands and smiled again, winningly. “Anyone would think that no one in the world has ever got married before.” The use of that private nickname, he knew, invariably disarmed her.
Utterly unnerved by his unexpected entrance, Anna was still staring at him as if he had been a ghost, her forearms covering the picture that, for the first time in years, some strange impulse had driven her to take from its resting place to look at once more. Unsuccessfully she forced a smile. “Actually, darling – I’m a bit busy at the moment—”
Totally assuredly he flung himself upon the bed. “That’s all right. I’ll be quiet as a mouse, I promise. I won’t say a word. Just protect me from timetables and veils and ribbons and flower-girls for a while. You wouldn’t stand by and watch me driven completely round the bend, now would you?”
Anna relaxed a little, laughed, turned on the stool so that her back obscured the spread paper upon the dressing table. “Don’t be unkind, Nico. Victoria’s happy, that’s all. And so she should be. It isn’t every day that a girl gets married. And I have to say that it makes a change from talking about the wretched war—”
The expression on Nicholas’s bright, handsome face showed clearly that he did not agree, but he did not argue. He rolled instead upon his stomach and propped his chin on his hands, his feet waving in the air. “Seems jolly strange, I must say, acquiring a brother-in-law who’s older than my own father!”
“I expect it does, dear. But then – the decision is Victoria’s, after all. And I must say that, having come to know Samuel, I feel that she could have done a lot worse. He will certainly care for her. He can offer security, a good home—”
Nicholas pulled a face.
“—and I think that, at the bottom of it, these are the things that Victoria probably most needs.” Anna tried to keep her face severe before her son’s bright, teasing eyes. “We can’t all be the same you know.” With Victoria leaving home, Anna felt inclined to be generous towards the daughter that she had never herself truly understood or been close to. “Victoria’s different from you, that’s all. She’s—”
“—dull.” Nicholas said, grinning caustically. “Dull. Dull. Dull. That’s what Victoria is.”
“Nico!”
“Oh, Mumps – you know it’s true. I can’t imagine how you came to have her – she isn’t a bit like you.” He rolled over, dropped like a cat gracefully from the bed. “I say –I rather like that – is it your outfit for the wedding?”
Disarmed as he knew she would be by his not altogether feigned interest, she smiled. “Yes, it is. I’ve actually had the material since before the war. Now seemed as good a time as any to use it. Arabella designed it specially. And I thought perhaps the jet and amber pendant and earrings.” She could not hide her pleasure. She joined him by the dummy upon which the new clothes were displayed. Of golden velvet, its tiered skirt and matching hat trimmed with sleek black fur, it was fashionable rather than exotic – for Anna was well aware that there were times when her more flamboyant clothes embarrassed her daughter, and had thought to spare the girl that on her wedding day.
“The jet’ll look spiffing with it.” Grinning, Nicholas tweaked the skirt. “Mind you – bit daring isn’t it? You’ll show a fair bit of leg in that. Not—” that he added with another flashing smile “—that you don’t have a fair bit of leg to show, of course.”
Laughing, she slapped his hand away. “For goodness’ sake – look at those dirty paws! And – it isn’t that short – shorter skirts are very fashionable at the moment.” She was fussing with the neckline of the jacket when she caught a movement from the corner of her eye. She spun around. “Nico!” Her voice had changed, rang suddenly with alarm as her son, apparently aimlessly, wandered across the room to the dressing table, “What are you doing?”
“Hel-lo – who’s this?” Before she could reach him he had picked up the picture, looked at it, grinning. “Bit of a devil, this one, from the look of him. Who is he?” He lifted his head, caught sight in the mirror of his mother’s face, frozen in guilt, over his shoulder. Saw in that instant something else too, for the first time. Saw beneath a falling lock of hair a pair of eyes that glittered, and laughed, a well-shaped, straight mouth that tilted to a smile. Saw the face each time he looked into a mirror. Then looked down again at the picture he held.
“Give it to me,” Anna said grimly, her voice brooking no argument.
Wordlessly, he folded it and handed it to her. She snatched it, regardless of its frail state. Carelessly and lucently the boy smiled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was private.”
“It’s just – someone I knew. A long time ago.”
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Of course not.”
He leaned to her, kissed her lightly upon the cheek. “I suppose I’d better go and rescue Ben from our almost-married sister’s clutches. Poor Ben would actually allow himself to be done to death by boredom before he’d do anything about it. See you later, Mumps.”
“’Bye, darling.” Her breath still caught in her throat; despite all she could do to prevent it the words were jerky.
She closed the door behind him, leaned upon it for a moment, the crumpled paper in her hand. The picture couldn’t have meant anything to him. It couldn’t.
Nicholas ran lightly up the stairs, his quick, precocious brain flitting from one thing to another, forming theories, testing them. Outside the nursery door he paused, his eyes very thoughtful.
“—and I do hope that Samuel’s son can get back from France in time to be best man,” Victoria was saying, worriedly. “And, oh dear – if he does come I do hope he likes me. He’s the only one I haven’t met.”
“Oh, of course he will. How could he not?” Ben’s voice was reassuring.
“It’s just – it’s all so very nerve-wracking—”
In Nicholas’s head at last a small, interesting piece of the puzzle had clicked satisfyingly into place. “Anna, August 1900,” he said softly. “Nineteen hundred. Well, well, well.” He pushed open the door, his smile brilliant. “Hey – I’ve an idea—”
Two faces turned to him surprised and – from long experience – wary.
“Let’s go and see Sophie. Cheer her up a bit.”
Undisguised relief cleared the way for assenting smiles.
He looked from one to the other, the very picture of injured innocence. “Why – what on earth did you think I was going to?”
The wedding, to Anna’s well-hidden relief, was not the trial it might have been. Any celebration in this time when there seemed so little to celebrate, though welcome, could be so easily marred by the absence of so many who would under happier circumstances have attended. Many people simply could not bring themselves to ask after a missing face for fear of the news that the answer might bring, and so quite often Anna had noticed about these affairs a fierce and artificial gaiety that she found at the same time pathetic and wearing. Adding to this the fact that this particular occasion would bring together two very different families and their friends, the odds had seemed to her to be stacked in favour of disaster. Already she knew from a few unguarded comments from her ingenuous daughter that the Bottomleys as a family, whilst approving wholeheartedly of Victoria herself, entertained some reservations about the more flamboyant Anatovs. That the reverse might also hold true Anna suspected would not have occurred to them: but it was not only Nicholas – who referred to them invariably and to his sister’s distress as ‘the worthy Bottomleys’ – who was convinced that Victoria’s future in-laws were likely to be sober, virtuous, and deadly dull.
The day itself dawned bright and clear and very cold. The proximity of Christmas lent to the festivities an added zest. Victoria was a breathtaking picture in her white satin, fur-trimmed gown, her bouquet a brilliant, seasonal splash of colour with its red-berried holly, shining laurel and trailing ivy. The church too was decked for Christmas, and a small, charmingly candle-lit crib stood to one side of the altar. Victoria, pale with nerves, stood rigid in the porch of the church as her mother smoothed and arranged the folds of her skirt.
“Honestly, Mama, I still don’t see why we couldn’t have had a much quieter wedding. It doesn’t seem—”
“Nonsense, dear. There. Turn around.” Anna straightened. “That looks lovely.” She looked at Joss who, with one of his rare smiles, extended an arm to his daughter. Anna stood for a moment, surveying them both, astonished by a sudden and unexpected constriction of her throat. She swallowed, said briskly, “I’d better go and find my place. Good luck.”
Impulsively Victoria stepped to her, hugged her close. “Thank you, Mama,” she said, softly and simply.
Smiling, Anna turned and walked, her breath clouding the cold air, down the long, columned aisle to her place beside the two boys. Ridiculously the light of the candles blurred and danced as she walked. She blinked rapidly, acknowledged soft greetings and smiles. In her seat she sat very straight and resisted the impulse to mop at her idiotically damp eyes. There was a stir of expectation, then, in the body of the church and the organ’s first dramatic note sounded. As the ceremony started Anna found herself watching not Victoria and Samuel but Joss, who stood, handsome as ever in his morning suit beside his daughter. Did he, Anna wondered, remember their wedding in this very church more than Victoria’s lifetime ago? So much had happened since – to them, and to the world – that it almost seemed two strangers had once stood here and taken these same vows that Victoria now spoke in a tremulous voice. Almost. As Joss took his place in the pew beside her, Anna glanced at him. The look he returned was utterly unreadable. She turned her attention back to the altar.
The reception was held at home in Bayswater, and the house was filled to bursting. Men in uniform, or morning dress, a predominance of women in pre-war finery carefully refurbished, children beginning the afternoon as models of good behaviour and ending it, despite a gaggle of nursemaids and nannies, under everyone’s feet. There had been no question in this time of shortages of providing a full-blown meal, but the cook and the caterers between them had managed a very satisfactory buffet and Joss, from some mysterious source known only to himself, had provided more than enough champagne to oil the wheels of celebration. He and Anna had their first real conversation of the day half-way through the afternoon as the guests gathered in the long drawing room to watch the newly-weds cut a cake that might a few short years before have been considerably bigger.
“I saw the design that you did for the new Red Cross poster the other day. Congratulations, it’s excellent.”
Anna jumped. Joss stood beside her, his eyes upon their daughter and her new husband.
“Why – thank you.”
“I thought it very striking.”
She said nothing. Joss had arrived very late the evening before, long after she had retired to bed, and they had seen each other hardly at all in the whirlwind morning.
“How are you?”
He nodded. “Well, thank you.”
“Will you be – staying long?” She was struck, as she had been before, by the ridiculous formality of their relationship. How very pleasant to see you again, Mr So-and-so. Will you be staying long? Her mouth turned down, wryly.
“I’m afraid not. We’ve a very important contract to fill. I’ll have to leave first thing in the morning.”
What else had she expected? Why should she care? His absence, she found herself telling herself, has always been more comfortable than his presence—
There came a sudden shout of laughter from a group of people standing nearby. Anna glanced at them and smiled. Beth, at the centre of the gaiety, winked back. A mistletoe branch was being passed from hand to hand, and the appropriate forfeit taken. Not far from them Samuel Bottomley’s daughter, a tall, ungainly girl with a plain, kindly face smiled too, and said something to the serious-faced young man in uniform with whom she was standing.
“Everyone seems to be getting on remarkably well,” Anna said, lightly. “I have to say that I had my doubts.”
A burst of applause signalled the cutting of the cake.
“I rather like weddings,” she went on, inconsequentially, in the face of his silence. “There always seems to be that feeling that people have truly gathered to wish the couple well. Don’t you think?” She was aware of his eyes upon her. Oddly, she found she could not face the dark gaze, and she averted her own, letting it slip over the sea of happy, animated faces around her. “Even now. Even with this dreadful war—” Suddenly the vivacity seemed to drain from her. She looked down at her half-empty glass, then lifted her head at last to look at him. “The third Christmas,” she said softly. “How many more, do you think? How many more Christmases? How many more deaths?”
He shook his head. “Who knows?”
The crowd around them was singing now. “For they are jolly good fellows, For they are jolly good fellows—”
“Joss—”
He raised questioning eyebrows. He stood very close to her in the overcrowded room. It was a moment of strange intimacy. She wanted suddenly to touch him. Shout at him. Shake him. Shatter, at last, for better or for worse, that rigid barrier of distrust and hostility that had held them apart for so long. God in heaven, she found herself thinking, isn’t there enough hatred in the world at the moment without our adding to it? And for what? Isn’t tomorrow more important than yesterday? “Joss – couldn’t we at least—”
“Mama! Papa! We’ve been looking for you absolutely everywhere?” Nicholas swooped upon them. His young, boy-smooth cheeks were champagne-flushed, his eyes bright as gemstones. Ben, as always, trailed in his wake. “Samuel says Papa has to make a speech. He’s in quite a tizzy about it.” He lifted a bright, challenging head and looked at Joss. Anna’s heart sank at the look in the man’s eyes. Nicholas laughed. “You’re holding up the proceedings, you know. Awfully bad form.”
“I’m coming.” Joss, with no look at Anna, shouldered his way, politely apologetic, through the crowd to where a radiant Victoria and a Samuel, looking at least ten years younger than his age, waited. Anna sighed. Nicholas glanced at her, an odd light in his eyes.
“Come on, Mumps. Cheer up. You aren’t losing a daughter, you know. You’re gaining a grand-dad!”
“Nicholas!” As always she could not withstand his laughter.
He leaned to her, whispering. “Come on upstairs. We’ve cleared the nursery and got the old gramophone going. Dancing, and singing and—” he rolled his eyes “—all kinds of mischief. There are,” he added solemnly, “even a couple of the younger Bottomleys up there. So your reputation will be quite safe!”
She laughed. “Later.”
He grinned and sidled away from her through the quietening crowd. Ben hesitated, hovering at her side for a moment before with a quick, nervous smile he followed his brother.
Joss’s speech was short and entertaining. Anna saw, as he finished, his eyes searching the sea of faces. As they rested upon hers he began to move towards her.
“Anna, my dear! How much it must mean to you to see Victoria so safely settled and happy—”
She turned. Hermione Smithson, portly, white-haired, stood beside her, beaming, her florid face sheened delicately with sweat. Beside her was Josef, frail-looking but smiling. “I was just saying to your father—”
Anna turned her head.
Joss had gone.
She hardly saw him again, except from a distance. In the morning he had left before she had lifted her champagne-heavy head from the pillow. He had, however, left a message for her. He would not, he regretted, be home for Christmas; the contract he had mentioned was vital to the war effort and must come first.
Of course.
Anna leaned to the mirror and thoughtfully smoothed the skin about her eyes, touching her moistened finger tip to her arched, tidily plucked brows.
She would ask Beth for Christmas. The boys adored her. And Arabella. And that fascinating man that Arabella appeared to be living with. What was his name? Something Italian. He was an opera singer. She must try to book him for the Red Cross Gala in January. Josef, of course, wouldn’t want to come all the way to town for Christmas; but she and the boys could spend the New Year at Bissetts. They could go beagling on New Year’s Day. With all those retired Colonels and Brigadiers. That would be fun.
She straightened, sighed, and then with a burst of impatient energy that refused to take note of her thumping head, she reached for her gown and started for the bathroom.
It was the worst winter that Europe had known in nearly forty years. The same cold that had frosted the air of the church where Victoria had become Mrs Samuel Bottomley froze men to the very marrow, sometimes to death, in the desecrated countryside that was the front line in a war that as yet no one showed signs of winning. Another Christmas; no truce this year, no comradely meeting in the barbed and deserted land between the opposing lines. The men that died that Christmas day, a sacrifice not to the Christian God to whose favour, ironically, both sides laid claim but to the flawed gods of war and national greed were just as dead, the day notwithstanding. Such things as hope, and promise and the birth of a Child had almost ceased to have meaning in those muddy, rat-ridden holes in the ground where quickness of eye, a good strong arm, a sense of humour and – above all – a highly-developed sense of self-preservation were understandably of more value and assistance to a man than the traditionally Christian virtues of loving kindness and forbearance.
Lieutenant Rupert Rose, MC, was astonished to discover, in the early spring of 1917, when the raw days and bitter nights still flayed skin to blood and froze fingers and toes from agony to insensibility, that he was ordered on leave.
“To take effect immediately, Rose. Get yourself a razor packed. There’s a truck leaving in half an hour.”
Rupert shook his head. “If you don’t mind, Sir—”
“Oh, but I do mind.” His Commanding Officer fixed him with a look that had quelled rebellion in more recalcitrant souls than Rupert’s. “You’re off, lad. For a fortnight. And that’s an order.”
“But—”
A cold eye stopped the words before they could form. “But you want to collect a few more medals before the end of the month, Lieutenant?”
Rupert flushed hotly. The bunker, despite the cold outside, was fuggily warm, and already in his unsuitable clothing – he had been inspecting the forward lookout posts when he had been summoned – he was sweating uncomfortably, the skin of his wind-flayed face stinging. “No, Sir. Of course not, Sir,” he said stiffly, resentment in every formally correct line of his body.
The face softened. “Go home, Rupert,” the captain said, sympathy in his tired voice. “Before you get yourself – or someone else – killed. The war will still be here in a couple of weeks’ time.” He smiled bleakly. “Don’t worry. We won’t be going anywhere without you.”
Rupert saluted, spun on his heel and left. Thirty minutes later he was perched uncomfortably on a pile of dirty sacking in the back of a truck that rattled towards the reserve trenches and the railhead, his eyes upon the familiar, shell-lit night, his mind a blank.
Bissetts hadn’t changed. Incredible as it seemed to him in this world where he had felt that surely nothing could have remained untouched, Bissetts was the same. The great trees, wind-tossed now, still reached to a peaceful sky, the grass was green and smooth, unpitted, the brickwork of the house solid, unscarred, soft and mellow. The Essex countryside stretched its tranquil patchwork about the house, with no raw wound of war to be seen. He had all but forgotten that such a place could exist except in memory. The very silence shouted in his ears. He stood for a moment on the drive, looking at the house. He had dismissed the trap that had brought him from the station – with the shortage of petrol had come a revival of the more traditional modes of transport – at the foot of the wide drive and had chosen to walk to the house; though whether the more to savour his homecoming or to put off the moment of his arrival he himself would have been hard-put to say. He hunched into his greatcoat, pulled the collar closer about his ears, the wind whipped at his cap, tugged at the heavy skirts of his coat. Beyond the house he could see the tennis court, the grass long-grown and winter-rough, the empty netposts green with mould.
Richard’s voice: “My ’vantage. Come on, Rupe – you can do better than that.” Cool lemonade. Laughter. Cucumber sandwiches. Crisp apples from the autumn orchard—
A pain stabbed, so savagely that it took his breath and stilled his blood with its agony. No. Bissetts was not the same. Would never be the same. For one instant he had to make a physical effort to prevent himself from turning, running back the way he had come. Running anywhere. Anywhere but here.
“Rupert! Christ! Son – it is you? Your mother said it was – we couldn’t believe—” His father stood at the open door. Behind him a young man in uniform, a crisp, snow-white bandage about his head and covering one eye, watched with an interested, sympathetic smile.
Alex ran down the steps and across the crunching shingle of the drive at a speed remarkable in one so large. A yard from Rupert he stopped. His face was working. “You didn’t let us know – didn’t tell us you were coming.”
“I couldn’t. It was – very sudden.” The bone-weariness in the young face was echoed in the voice.
Alex took an odd, juddering breath, controlled with difficulty the impulse to fling himself upon this tall, gaunt figure and hug him. He stuck out his hand. “Welcome home, lad.”
Rupert took his hand, felt its tremor, smiled. “Thanks.” Over his father’s shoulder he saw that now his mother, thin and elegant, her changed face radiant, had appeared at the door of the house. He covered the distance between them in seconds. “Mother!” He clenched her to him, felt the strong, nervous hands clutch fiercely at his shoulders. Then he lifted his head and froze. A young woman holding a child stood on the stairs in the darkness of the hall, staring at him, an absolute agony of grief in her dark eyes. A ghost of yesterday. The very last person he had expected to see. “My God!” he said, and closed his eyes, knowing what he had done to her.
Sophie very, very carefully descended the last few steps, transferred the weight of the child on to her left arm. Extended a steady, narrow hand. “Rupert. How lovely to see you.”
He did not know – how could he – that the tears that had suddenly started to run unchecked, it seemed almost unnoticed, down her cheeks were the first she had cried since his brother’s death.
She avoided him for days, as far as she could, and he could not find it in his heart to blame her for it. Who knew better than he the likeness between himself and the dead; as who knew better the disparity? And in any case his own frame of mind did not prompt him to any close association with Sophie, or for that matter with anyone else. He slept as much as he could, walked the winter lanes alone when the restlessness of dread forced him out, tried – unsuccessfully on the whole – to live from day to day without thought, to enjoy this brief respite. And all the time in his mind, in his gut, in his very bones the fear crouched, waiting; waiting to leer from a shadowed corner, to grin in the darkness, to gnaw with sharp teeth at his strength, his will – sometimes he wondered if not at his very sanity.
His enemy showed itself one day, a day of gusting, gale-force winds and rain that drove against the window like hard-flung stones, when he sat before the fire in the upstairs sitting room, a book open but unread on his lap, his eyes distant upon the flames. Outside, trees creaked in protest as the wind shrieked to a crescendo. The sharp crack as one of the brittle branches of the old ash tree that stood upon the lawn not far from the house finally gave under the onslaught might have been a pistol shot. Rupert’s head snapped back in shock, and he ducked, cringing. His mother, her eyes upon the window, did not notice the movement. Sophie did, and he caught in her eyes a sudden, surprised flash of unnerving compassion that he found utterly intolerable. He stood up abruptly. “I think I’ll stroll down to the village.”
His mother looked around at him in astonishment. “But – darling! – it’s absolutely foul out there! You’ll get soaked.”
He shook his head. “I need a bit of air. And I’m almost out of cigarettes.”
Minutes later he strode down the drive, hands in pockets, collar turned against the wind, his footsteps crunching on the wet gravel, his face lifted to the driving rain as if he welcomed its sting. He walked to the village, bought the packet of cigarettes that were his excuse for the errand, dismissed the thought of a pint at the local pub for fear that he would almost certainly find himself paying for it in a friendly and inquisitive conversation, and turned back towards Bissetts. The rain had stopped for the moment and the wind had died a little, though it still blustered across the drenched countryside and piled the fast-moving rain clouds one upon another like mountains of dark fleece. He slowed his footsteps. If only time could be arrested. If only this tranquil moment of safety and solitude could be captured forever, riven from past and from future to exist alone, like the bubbles he and Richard had used to blow as children into the still summer air that would waft, rainbow-hued to the bright sky, there to hang and drift feather-light in the sunshine until they burst. Until they burst. He stopped for a moment, tilted his head to watch the racing clouds.
Is that what death will be like? Like the sudden bursting of a bubble? I hope so. God – I hope so. That would be bearable. At least for me.
“Rupert?”
She stood by the roadside, watching him. Her fair hair was wind-blown as a child’s and in the dark storm-light the lines of strain upon her face were disguised. Almost he could have believed that they had stepped back in time, and were young again.
“I popped down to see Uncle Josef. Then I waited for you. Do you mind?”
He shook his head. “Of course not. How is he?”
Sophie half-shrugged. “He’s not too bad. Physically he seems fine, in fact. But he does ramble a lot – at least, I think it’s rambling. The news from Russia – the riots, the Tsar’s abdication – it seems to have set him thinking about the past more than ever. It’s only natural, I suppose. He talks a lot of my Aunt Tanya. Yet sometimes I think he’s almost forgotten who I am.”
“She killed herself, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did. Before we were born. Yet – he talks as if it were yesterday. He speaks of her – to her, sometimes – as if she were a child. She came with him from Russia, you know.”
“Yes. I did know.”
“I think she wasn’t – quite right in the head.” They had turned into the gate and were strolling slowly towards the house. She looked at him, unsmiling. “I don’t suppose you fancy a bit of a walk?”
He hesitated.
“All right,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“No – please – I’d like to.”
“No. You wouldn’t. And I don’t blame you.”
Suddenly and unexpectedly, after the weeks, the months of silence, he wanted to talk. He stopped. She turned, and tilted her head to look steadily at him. “Please,” he said again.
She nodded.
They turned their footsteps on to the wet grass beneath the tossing trees. “When I first arrived,” he said after a moment, “I thought – I rather expected – that you might leave.”
“I nearly did. Then I thought – no. It would just be running away, wouldn’t it?”
Their feet whispered wetly in the short grass. “I’m glad, so very glad, that you agreed to visit them,” he said, softly. “I can’t tell you how much it means to them.”
Her mouth turned down, bitterly, at the corners, but she did not speak.
“It must have been very hard for you,” he said.
“Yes. It was.” She glanced sideways at him, half-defiant. “But I don’t want you running off with the idea that I’m noble or anything. I’m not. I did it for Richard. Purely for him. And for Flissy.”
“Richard would have been very proud of you.”
Dark lashes veiled her eyes. Her face was expressionless.
“I’m sorry – you don’t want to talk about him.”
She looked at him then, and he saw the pain, the desolation of loss. “There’s no point, is there?” she asked, collectedly. “Richard’s dead. Gone. Nothing will bring him back. One of thousands. Of hundreds of thousands. Perhaps – who knows? – of millions before this – this lunacy is ended. Flissy will never know him. God! What are we doing to ourselves?”
They stopped beneath the bare, spreading branches of a magnificent oak. The great trunk afforded at least some shelter from the wind. Rupert lit a cigarette, cupping his hands to the match. Sophie picked at the bark of the tree with her fingernail.
Rupert tilted his head to look up into the tree. “We used to have a treehouse up there. See? Where the big branch forks.”
“I see it. It looks very high.”
“Richard would have it right up there.” He half-laughed. “To be truthful I used to suffer agonies over it. I’ve always been a bit afraid of heights. I used to find the climb up there pretty fearful at first.”
“But – you got used to it?” She was not looking at him. “More or less.”
“Did Richard ever know? That you were afraid?”
He shook his head. “No.”
She leaned against the tree. “And now?”
“Now?”
“Are you still—” she paused “—afraid of heights?” Her voice was light, her eyes intense and questioning.
He took a long breath. Above them the clouds had broken a little and the faintest gleam of pale sunshine touched the waterlogged countryside, lining it in silver and in pearl. “Yes,” he said, very quietly, “I am afraid. Of everything.” He turned from her, leaned against the tree, drew deeply on the cigarette, his eyes on the wetly-gleaming countryside. “I’m afraid of death. Of the grief that my death will inflict on others. I’m afraid of pain. Of mutilation. Of fear. I’m afraid of going back.”
She said nothing.
“Over there – I wake with fear each morning. I eat with it, drink with it, sleep with it. It’s a familiar face in the mirror. Here,” he shook his head, helplessly, “it’s as I feared – it’s worse. Much worse. I had grown used to it. Now, I have to start again.”
“But – I thought,” her voice was soft, and she stumbled upon the words, “I mean – you’ve been so brave. The Military Cross. Mentioned in dispatches, twice.”
He made a small, impatient movement with his head. “I didn’t say I was a coward,” he said. “I said I was afraid.”
She sucked her lip, watching him. And for the first time since Richard’s death the ice in which misery had sheathed her heart melted a little and she found herself sharing, almost physically, another’s pain. She had after all loved Rupert as a friend before she had found a lover in Richard.
“Have you told anyone else?” she asked, not knowing why she asked, not knowing why it was important.
He shook his head.
She pushed herself away from the tree, held out her hand, the hand of love and compassion.
With no hesitation he took it, and together they walked back to the house.