Carrie allowed herself to sink into the sofa’s full velvet cushions. She even stretched out her toes to the fire. Life at The Elms in Rottingdean was easier for her now that Rud’s spirits were improving. He was less irritable with her too, so long as he didn’t dwell on the sins of his American publishers. It made such a difference to him, having Aunt Georgie living close at hand. A difference to her, also, having an ally. A woman who cared for Rud without wanting always to be first with him.
She was drifting deliciously, almost dozing, when a shiver woke her. A long breath of icy air sighed in from the hall. Rud was back from his walk.
‘What a way to live. No wonder there’s such a dead dull look on all the faces.’ He left his coat in the hall to be put away, forgetting the heavy knitted scarf which still hung round his neck. ‘How can a man think or feel when all his force is occupied in fighting cold and wind?’
His anger, coming without warning, struck her full in the chest. It wasn’t just the weather, his rage was turned on her. Even when he was obviously angry he’d always been slow to admit the fact. She’d been fearing something like this. Ever since they’d had to leave Naulakha. No point in avoiding the issue any longer.
‘Are you blaming me? You never minded the cold in Brattleboro. Do you feel it was my fault, that I should have made a better hand of managing Beatty? Just remember how busy I was with the children.’
To her alarm, her voice trembled. For all her fierceness, she couldn’t shake off the sense that she had indeed failed.
‘No-one’s blaming you, Carrie,’ he was gentle at once – ‘it’s the general cussedness of things, not to mention Scribners and their delays with the new edition. I do just long for the sun. It’s what I need to feel alive. I dream of India. Even of the glare. I want the blessed touch of the sun on my back, riding out before breakfast.’
Carrie grew still. It was not the first time that she’d heard this.
‘What are you telling me? You’re going out there? And what about the children, you can’t –’
Rud held up both hands.
‘No, that’s not what I meant. I’m not going to go off and leave you, you should know that by now, my foolish girl. There’re other things I long for besides heat. That new-minted world of India, ablaze and waiting to be explored. I was twenty then. But that’s all over. I’m too damned recognisable these days.’
Carrie took up the little shirt she’d been hemming. She sensed an opening. She would go slowly. ‘You know, Rud, what you say about new worlds reminds me. I’ve had an idea. All these problems with Scribners and their delays. I think you’ll end by taking Putnams to court for jumping the gun and bringing out that unauthorised edition. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you were to go over and deal with both of them on the spot? New York in winter’s not like Sussex – the skies are blue, the snow sparkles – ’
‘And it would be a chance for you to see your mother. I see through you, Carrie. No, don’t look crushed, I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s hard for you not being able to live near her.’
The catch in her throat stopped her when she was going to reply.
‘Well, the curse of Beatty has fallen upon us and we must both abide it. Your mother and Naulakha, our beautiful boat of a house – everything had to be surrendered.’
‘But we can still visit New York. And take the children. Mother’s never seen Baby John except in photographs.’
He straightened in his chair and looked across at her.
‘That really might be an idea. I don’t want Jo to lose her American ways. She’s such a straight little creature – none of those affectations I see developing in her cousins. I’ll tell you what, it’s a bit late in the day to think of going for Christmas but I’ll look into sailings in the New Year.’
She pushed the sewing-box aside.
‘I can’t believe how excited that makes me. Or how quickly you’ve taken up the idea.’
He grinned back at her, relieved as she was to find a plan that made them both happy.
‘It does appeal to me – there’s young Doubleday for instance – remember, he came out to us at Naulakha. Now he’s started up on his own, I’d like to see him. There’s only so much you can do with letters.’
Carrie caught at his sleeve. ‘Rud, don’t let your people know you think badly about Jo’s cousins – above all don’t say anything in front of Jo.’ But he was already out on the stairs and half way to his study.
The following day over in Tisbury, Lockwood was peacefully absorbed in his studio. At the smooth click of the door handle, he looked up from the clay he was working while his hands continued their patient persuasion.
‘Come in, come in,’ he called but no encouragement was needed.
Alice swept past him, with scarcely a look, her own eyes fixed on a corner of the ceiling. ‘How long has that damp stain been there, Jack?’
‘Where? Where?’ He followed her pointing finger. ‘To tell you the truth…’
‘Don’t tell me you never noticed it. You really are too bad. I knew I should have insisted on having the man Lady Mowbray recommended but you would overrule me.’
‘Be reasonable, my dear, overruling isn’t usually seen as my forte.’
She wasn’t listening. ‘I’ll just have to get him back.’
‘If you’re not satisfied with his work, let me deal with him. He’s a good sort of chap.’
‘Jack, you are so soft-hearted, I imagine he spun you a tale about his poor old mother –’
He raised a hand, in protest.
‘Nothing of the kind. He asked me about firing pots.’
His wife sighed. ‘Very well. I leave it all to you. But don’t blame me if you find your treasures green with mould and the paper tearing apart under your pencil.’
He laughed aloud: ‘However much rain comes in you know it’s not going to create effects on the scale of the Bombay monsoon, you fearful exaggerating woman.’
Alice glanced over at the clock. ‘It’s the day for Rud’s letter. The second post should be here by now – let me go and see.’
In the quiet she had left behind, Lockwood returned to his methodical shaping until the door flew open again, this time without warning. He sighed.
‘Jack, did you know about this? Ruddy says they are taking those three tiny children across the Atlantic in January.’
Straightening, Lockwood slowly wiped his hands on his linen apron, ‘That does seem rather odd. Are you quite sure?’
She waved the pages dense with black ink scrawl at him. ‘Here, on the second page, towards the end. Read it for yourself.’
Lockwood brought the sheets up to his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly. ‘That appears to be the plan.’
‘We can’t let him do it. It’s quite irresponsible; they can’t have thought it through.’
‘Let him? I have no control over him and nor do you. He’s thirty-three years old, not thirteen.’
‘It’s that woman behind it, I know. First she tries to get him living near her own disreputable family, so they can sponge off him. Then when that doesn’t answer, she requires him to carry her over to America just when the fancy takes her.’
‘Alice, Alice, no. Calm down. I’m afraid you’re quite unjust to poor Carrie – the letter speaks of business dealings and sorting out Rud’s copyrights over there.’
‘But the children? Can it be wise to uproot them and expose them to that journey in the depths of winter?’
Uproot the children? ‘It’s not as far from Sussex to New York as it is from Bombay to Southsea’, he was tempted to retort. Unlike Alice, he’d not been able to set aside Baa Baa Black Sheep, that terrible story of Rud’s about those two children.
‘I don’t know about uprooting. Those children are excellent travellers. Little Jo told Rud that ‘the best way to study geography was to go about in ships until you’ve seen all the countries.’
Alice threw him a look of scorn.
‘Jack, I believe you’ve told me that story before. Taking them all out to Cape Town last January to get some sunshine once they’d left that gloomy house was one thing – but it’s hard to see how a trip to New York in the depths of winter can be good for anyone.’
With a reluctant nod, he conceded.
‘I can’t pretend that I feel happy about this proposal. Yet what can we do?’
‘What can we do? I shall write myself this instant and tell them we think it most unwise. I shall write to Carrie.’
He sighed. This didn’t sound wise.
‘Perhaps we could offer to take charge of the children while they’re away? I’ve been feeling that we don’t see enough of those babies.’
‘In a house this size? Three babies and their nursemaids? To say nothing of the burden on the kitchen. And what about Trix? You know she refuses to see anyone, even Ruddy.’
An ache in his chest, remembering Rud’s shock and distress. He’d arrived alone, without Carrie, but Trix would have nothing to do with him. The scene she’d made! That was when they’d agreed that a nursing home might be the best place for a while. A day he didn’t care to remember.
‘I thought we’d agreed that it was for the doctors to look after Trix, poor darling, until she feels calmer. It doesn’t seem at all likely that she’s going to be coming home before the spring. I was thinking that we’d move into The Elms and manage things there, just for a few weeks, you know.’
‘You’d give up your workshop?’ She stared at him then moved away towards the window. ‘I suppose we could move in there, just for a limited time, though I must be free to leave at a moment’s notice. I have to be here for Trix. When she needs me.’ She was looking deep into the gloomy little garden as she spoke.
Less than a week elapsed before a letter from Alice, addressed for once to Carrie, arrived in Rottingdean.
Caroline Balestier Kipling could not believe what she was reading. Angry pleasure made her glow. Mrs. Kipling had excelled herself. Offering advice on the care of children, proposing to move into Carrie’s home and take over her place in it.
Rud was late down to breakfast – junketing in the nursery again, she thought grimly, working Jo up before the day was even started.
‘What do you think of this?’
She threw the letter down at his place almost before he could seat himself.
His face darkened as he read: ‘incautious, thoughtless, responsibility as a parent, idle gratification’.
‘That she – of all women – should accuse me of indifference to the welfare of children!’
He got up and marched about the room, the letter still in his hand.
Carrie felt a thrill of satisfaction. ‘Unwarrantable intrusion on your mother’s part, don’t you think?’
He could barely get the words out: ‘Whatever her views on the matter, she’s not going to stop us. And she’s not coming here.’
‘I couldn’t think of it. The children hardly know her – and anyway we’ve always said that we’re not going to be separated from them. Where we go, they go.’
At her words, Rud stopped his pacing. ‘Thanks be to Allah we are of one mind in that, my dear,’ and he bent to kiss her. She beamed back at him.
‘Now suppose you sit down again with me and eat your breakfast. There’s a whole heap of mail to be got through and we don’t want to leave a backlog. It’ll be bad enough, all we’ll find waiting when we get back.’
* * *
Frank Doubleday had known in advance that the Kiplings were taking a suite at the Hotel Grenoble on West 56th St. Later he heard that the children were feverish on arrival and that Carrie too had fallen ill. Apparently she recovered quickly but by the third week of February Kipling himself had become sick.
Frank really didn’t want to intrude. He was on good terms, very good terms, with Kipling and he got along well enough with the lady, too. Nevertheless, they were so careful of their privacy that he hesitated to present himself at the hotel. It was no secret that Kipling had been taken ill; he’d be betraying no confidence. And yet it didn’t feel right to leave the family in the solitude of their hotel suite, when there was sickness. Dammit, he had a right, a duty as Kipling’s publisher, to enquire after his health. If they didn’t like it, he need not feel personally snubbed.
Arguing with himself in this way, Frank dismounted from the streetcar and began to trudge, head bent against the wind that sliced down Grenoble Street. God knew what had possessed them to choose the hotel, he thought, glancing round in the twilight of the foyer. Who could have recommended such a morgue? There were flakes of snow on his moustache, still unmelted, he noted, as he reached into his breast pocket for a card.
Fully expecting it to be returned with a scribbled note, a polite acknowledgement of his concern, he was taken aback to hear the desk clerk announce ‘Mrs. Kipling’s compliments and would he be kind enough to go up to the suite.’ He gestured towards the brass cage of the elevator: ‘Third floor.’ Before Frank had time to explore the shift in his sense of the occasion, he found himself face-to-face with Caroline Kipling. He hesitated, as yet, to think of her in more familiar terms. She was already standing waiting for him in the corridor.
Her face was set and pale: he knew that he had done right to come, even before she began to speak.
‘It is so good to see a friend, Mr. Doubleday. I hope you won’t mind talking out here but I don’t want to worry Rud and if Baby hears my voice he’ll start calling out for me.’
He began a gesture of impatience – this was no time for the niceties of etiquette – but thinking better of it, simply took her hand. Carrie Kipling let it lie in his heavy clasp for a moment, as though she did not want to take it back.
‘The doctor’s just gone: his second visit since noon. Earlier he suspected it was pneumonia but now he told me he’s certain that both lungs are affected. “Involved”, I think, was the word he used.’
Frank admired her control yet wondered with a part of his mind whether it wasn’t close to a form of hysteria. Before he could respond she went on with a kind of dogged calm, though he noticed that her voice was taking on a higher pitch:
‘Jo, too: she has pneumonia but at present it’s only in one lung.’
‘Your eldest child?’ he asked, pointlessly, his mind beginning to take in the scale of the threat.
‘So far, Elsie only has a bad cough. But Baby isn’t well either: I can tell that because he’s not eating.’ The almost comic note drew a giggle, despite herself.
Frank felt laughter rising in him too, impossible and inappropriate. What he had just heard was too alarming to contemplate directly. ‘No,’ he exclaimed, as much to himself as to Carrie, whose attention was turned, anyway, for sounds coming from the door which she had left ajar. The whiff of disinfectant which he caught sobered him in a moment.
‘What can I do to help you and your family?’ His voice was deliberately slow and steady. ‘Where do you want me to concentrate my attention?’
She replied only with another question: ‘How long can you stay?’
Frank considered. He had told his wife he would be home early that evening: they were crossing town to have dinner with her sister. He looked down at the taut figure in her high-necked dress. He removed his overcoat before he answered. ‘Why, I guess I’ll be staying here with you until your husband’s well again.’
If he caught the sound of a single dry sob, that was the last sign of weakness that escaped from Carrie Kipling. ‘That woman is one of the greatest organisers I have ever met,’ he would later exclaim, remembering. She saw with fearful clarity what had to, what could be done. Within the day, relays of nurses had been found and engaged, the best nurses, for extremity sharpened her judgment to brilliance. She was ruthless, now she had him for support: other friends in the city, Jim Conland, their doctor from Brattleboro, all were summoned, every pair of hands to whom the care of an invalid or a potential invalid could be trusted. Every form of support.
And her forethought! ‘We’re going to need stimulants: it will have to be whisky, the best we can get, Rud hates brandy.’
Her subdued urgency was like a well-ordered military response. It gave Frank the confidence of delegated authority. ‘I would be honoured to supply Mrs. Kipling with the blend I keep for myself,’ Andrew Carnegie had responded, in person over the telephone. Indeed, people wanted to help and not just because the fellow was so well-known.
It seemed Mrs. Kipling was speaking no more than the truth when she exclaimed, ‘Everyone he has ever spoken to loves him and wants to do what they can.’ More touching still was the invalid’s patience and his hoarse thanks.
Setting up supply lines and medical support at the start was one thing. That involved challenges that could be triumphantly overcome. Over the days and the nights that followed, however, as the patient weakened and rallied, sweated and struggled for breath, the watchers too began to be worn down. It must have been during that time that she insisted, ‘Carrie, please, just Carrie. That’s enough.’
He’d made his bed on the floor outside the sickroom, in order to be ready to answer need as it arose. Twice a day he was dealing with the importunate press: Rudyard Kipling’s illness was making headlines across the world. Under different circumstances he’d have been astonished to find himself dealing with personal telegrams from the Kaiser, but in those days at the Hotel Grenoble he was too exhausted for wonder.
In later years he could scarcely bear to look back, dreading to be lost again in the subdued horror surrounding the long wait for the pneumonia to reach its crisis. It wasn’t clear whether the little girl, Josephine, was keeping step with her father. Though his own attention was centred on Rud, as he now tenderly thought of the gasping figure propped up among pillows, there was a morning when Frank realised that the doctors were taking longer in the nursery than on other days. Elsie, the three-year-old and John, who could only just walk, had been sent in the care of their nurse to stay with friends in the first days after his arrival. Josephine had lain alone in the darkened room, attended by nurses from the hospital and visited hourly day and night by her mother.
Nearly a week of that and Carrie came to him, her face bleached. ‘I’ve made up my mind. Jo’s not getting enough attention and the doctor says the crisis is getting close for her. I want you to ask Julia de Forrest if she will take her for me. She’s one of my oldest and closest friends. Jo simply must have undivided attention: I can’t do it.’
It made sense what he was hearing but what about the journey? The address Carrie named was twenty-one blocks away. The bitter weather, the draughts… Seeing his hesitation, Carrie spoke harshly. ‘Please. Allow me to know what I’m doing. It’s for her good. She needs someone who can’t think of anything but her welfare. I can’t be that person. Look at me,’ she ended simply.
When the time came he took the bundle swathed with shawls in his arms and carried Josephine out through the dim lobby folding his own body round her to shield her from the cutting winds as he put her into the arms of Julia de Forrest, waiting in the carriage. The small face pressed into his shoulder was frighteningly hot. ‘Mummy is coming to visit me later,’ she told him, wheezing.
Living at such close quarters, he was forced to observe Carrie’s agony of self-discipline, though it felt barely decent to do so. Her choice was more than she could bear. Later he thought she began to age from the moment she took the decision to send Josephine away, though he could never be sure when it was he first noticed her hair had lost all its colour.
For the first twenty-four hours, reports were fairly good. The next day though, Carrie hurried out of the hotel early, leaving him in charge: she went back again to the de Forrests’ in the early afternoon. When she slipped out again shortly before ten, even through his own exhaustion he picked up a piercing sense of dread.
The following morning he found her crouched against the wall in the public corridor, no longer caring to hide herself or her racked weeping, only desperate to keep the sound of grief from the sickroom. There was nothing he could do for her, only wait.
‘Josephine has left us,’ Carrie said when she could speak.
Rud was coming through his crisis, though the days and nights of delirium seemed endless. He would not give up. Those who watched him trembled to see how his dreams wrung him.
‘Lie down now, Rud, and try not to struggle. It’s all for your own good we’re doing this,’ his old friend Jim Conland would implore.
But Rud wouldn’t stop fighting the nurses: ‘How dare you accuse me? I don’t cheat, I’ve never lied to anyone,’ he repeated. Tears ran from the corners of his eyes. The men round him looked at each other, uncomfortable. And what had made him so terrified of losing Carrie and the children? They were always disappearing in these nightmares. He croaked of endless journeying, terrifying confusions. Just to witness such helpless distress left observers disturbed.
But what would be his distress on waking? How to keep the news from Rud? Frank watched as that became Carrie’s obsession. The doctors agreed, he must be securely on the mend before he had to take that blow. Days passed. Nothing was said to hurry Carrie, for no-one wanted to give up the glow of relief as the patient passed out of danger.
‘The strain on you is too much, Carrie,’ Jim Conland said at last, watching her cast off the scarlet shawl she had been wearing over her mourning as she left the sickroom. She had shown exactly the steadfast courage he had anticipated, though even with all his experience he had shuddered to see what this cost her. ‘You’ve done your best to temper the wind to Rud but it can’t go on. He’ll notice your own tension, and sooner rather than later.’ For the first time, Frank saw Carrie show fear. The next moment she sent a glance of appeal across to him.
In all the stress of the last weeks he had never failed her. Now Frank knew what he must do. ‘If you think he’s ready to take it, Jim, then I’ll be the one to tell him.’
Conland who had likely been hoping as much, nodded. ‘Tomorrow, after my morning visit, if all continues well.’
Rud was definitely getting back to his old self. ‘They’ve been pummelling me fearfully old chap, to make sure that I’m getting rid of the congestion. It makes me cough something dreadful.’
Frank forced a smile and sat down. Rud was so quick, he’d guess something was up if he didn’t get on with it..
‘Rud,’ he began, laying a hand on the other’s forearm where it lay, alarmingly insubstantial, above the sheet. ‘While you were ill, something very bad happened.’ After a pause: ‘Josephine was ill too and we couldn’t save her. Josephine died.’
Out of the aching silence came a choked, ‘When?’
‘March 6th.’
Rud was too weak still to roll over unaided; after a moment’s futile effort, he gave up and turned away only his ravaged face.
It was kind of appalling to live beside them through their struggle. They knew they had to go on, so that’s what they did. Frank had no notion of what they said to each other. After the first week of shock, Rud had thrown himself like a trooper into recovery, demanding that his doctors let him spend an hour every day just talking to ‘my friend Frank’. Carrying him into the next room for a change of scene in the mornings, Frank found him no heavier than a child.
He always felt he had been right to try and stay at their side until they were safe back home in Rottingdean.
He did not guess what took place when Carrie slipped off to pick up some papers from Naulakha, their old home.
Stepping through the echoing shell of the chill house, Carrie climbed to the second floor.
She threw the light switch.
They’d planned to put playrooms up here one day when the girls were older.
There was Rud’s billiard table still, a scarlet ball standing alone out on the green baize, forgotten.
And there was his old roll-top desk, stored up here when he chose a more convenient model.
Carrie walked across to stand beside it. Her mouth twisting, she stared into the words Rud had carved into the frame.
‘Oft was I weary when I worked at thee.’
At last, she turned and trod heavily, step by step, down into the basement. There, up on the wall, hung all their tools, pliers, saws, hammers, screwdrivers, in orderly rows. She reached up and made her selection.
Her step was lighter, going back up the two flights of stairs. Once in front of the desk, without a second glance, she brought the largest hammer crashing down on its closed lid.
Sobs shook her as she gazed down at the splintered wreck.
What was it all for, all that effort?
‘Jo!’ the child’s name came out on a long moan. The empty space absorbed her voice.
Slowly Carrie returned to herself. She’d done her utmost for each of them, child and husband, exerted herself beyond any effort she’d ever known – and met only loss. How could she believe, whatever Rud said, that he didn’t blame her? There was nothing to be done.
Retracing her steps, she made her way down to their old room with its neat twin beds. They would never come back to live in Naulakha, she knew that now. She passed through into the bathroom. But the taps were dry. A handkerchief and her own spit must make her respectable for the journey to the station and onwards to New York.
* * *
Lockwood was tired. He looked round his studio, at the sacks of clay, the pots of pencils lying ready, and sighed. He hadn’t had a day to himself in here for he didn’t know how long. With both children in trouble, his time wasn’t his own. He’d snatched a few weeks to go out to New York to be with Rud and Carrie, during those dreadful weeks after Jo died. It had meant leaving Alice on her own to take care of Trix, who’d been able to leave the nursing home by then but what else could he do? Now October had come and Trix was showing no sign of further improvement.
Following a vain attempt at a civilised breakfast, they led Trix to a seat by the window in the drawing room. Alice had never had much of a gift for making a place comfortable. Now her daughter sat inert, her gaze turned obediently on the decaying garden. From time to time the index finger of her right hand picked at the line of brass studs that ran along the arm of her chair.
‘It is at least quiet in the house, after yesterday,’ Lockwood reminded his wife. They stood indecisive, already exhausted, in the cramped hallway.
‘I don’t know.’ Alice shook her head. ‘I don’t know whether this silence – it’s like a death, a suicide almost.’ He looked up sharply, putting out a protesting hand, but she went on, ‘I don’t know whether this isn’t worse than the screaming.’
He shuddered, remembering the previous afternoon.
He’d made his approach to Trix cautiously, once the postman had got well clear of the house.
‘Now dearest, shall I come and sit by you? Would you like that?’
Not finding himself rebuffed, he’d seated himself at her side under the little arbour to the right of the front door. It was a place that caught the sun even in winter and they’d persuaded Trix into trying it for half an hour.
She was still not looking at him but he’d persevered. ‘Something for you today in the post, Trixie. Tell me if I’m right, I think I recognise Jack’s hand –’
‘Jack’s hand,’ Father said.
It was a message. Secret but she had the code. Trix smiled knowingly to herself. They would not take her in this time. They meant she had to go back and let Jack touch her again.
Night after night, touch her in that place. No excuses.
Never. She would never.
But they must not suspect that.
‘He is the Lord High Executioner,’ she said aloud, ‘Master of the Survey. Look, there’s the official warrant, there in that envelope.’
Lockwood had seen her husband’s name break into her consciousness like a rifle shot. He’d wondered she had the breath for all that shrieking, even as he fought to get her, arms flailing and face suffused, back inside the house.
Once in the entrance hall, the front door firmly shut behind her, Trix had snarled in his face, her narrow lips drawn back. She’d thrown herself about, heedless of the bruises that would surely disfigure her for weeks to come. They could only wait, indifferent for once to the horrified curiosity of the maid whose head had bobbed into view round a door from time to time. It was Alice who’d managed to calm Trix in the end, speaking in repeated phrases, stroking her hand, refusing to give way to her own terror.
The doctor hadn’t been able to get near her, of course. Observing her head raised in renewed alert on his approach, the wild eye she’d turned, he’d retreated, leaving Alice to continue her soothing.
Stupor had succeeded the mania, this morning. Alice, for whom the doctor had also prescribed a sleeping draught, was haggard. For his part, Lockwood was grateful that nothing ever kept him awake. But he feared that he was going to fail at the task in front of him. Should he begin? He decided to wait a little, perhaps till they had seen how things went with Trix during the morning.
‘Leave her to me,’ Alice said, picking up his thought. Seeing him hesitate, she pushed him not altogether gently in the direction of his workshop. ‘I’ll know where you are.’ He made his escape.
Emerging with reddened eyes later in the morning, he found Alice pacing directly outside his door. ‘I’ve been with Trix all this time and I think we may have made a little progress.’
He would have liked to believe it.
She went on: ‘I was trying, you know, to find some easy, happy things to turn her mind to. I talked and talked – about the garden in Bombay and the drive where she used to dig up the sand and carry it over to the clay pots along the driveway, about the walks in her big red and green perambulator with Ruddy trotting along beside. It took simply ages but in the end Trix herself began to speak.’
‘“She wasn’t so bad, you know, Mother,” she said. At first I thought she meant Ayah – you know how I used to complain about her slack ways – but that wasn’t it at all. She’d gone straight to Mrs. Holloway. That was who she meant.’
‘The woman at Southsea?’
They eyed each other in silence. This was not going to be easy. It was more than ten years since Rud had published his revelations concerning life in Southsea. Never a word to them directly and then that story, published for all the world to read. Whenever Baa Baa Black Sheep came back to haunt her, Alice always tried to insist that much of it was fantasy, Ruddy’s imagination, that they couldn’t have guessed – Lockwood still shrank from the subject.
‘But how strange. What’s she got to do with anything, that woman?’
‘Jack, don’t you see, she’s telling us, telling me, not to worry about all that – that time in Southsea.’
It was something if Alice could find a degree of comfort for herself, he supposed.
‘Well, I know she did choose to go back and spend time with Mrs. Holloway. I’ve never been able to make it out. If there was any truth at all in what Rud claimed…’
‘It’s wonderful that she’s really talking to me again.’ Alice wasn’t listening. ‘I’ve always known how to handle her and now it’s really going to matter. Keeping her here with me, she agrees, is much the best thing for her.’
He didn’t know what to say. Loving his wife, yet appalled by her capacity for self-deception, he was paralysed. He did know, though, that he could not go on living like this. He had the doctor’s professional opinion behind him as he finally spoke.
‘Alice, dearest, we can’t care properly for Trix, not in this state.’
‘I won’t give her up, I won’t,’ his wife wept, even as he knew, his arms around her, that he was going to prevail.
Once doctors had taken over the care of Trix, Lockwood made his way across to Rottingdean as often as he could. He longed to take down his linen apron from where it hung on the back of the door and wrap himself in it ready for a day’s work. Instead he had to be off, over to The Elms. The burden of Rud and his terrible mourning couldn’t be shouldered entirely by Carrie. Besides, she had grief enough of her own.
Finding Carrie out on his arrival but expected home shortly, he dropped his overnight bag in the hall and went straight up to the nursery. He peeped in at Elsie and John, oblivious in their afternoon nap. So perfect, so defenceless, he shivered. The duck he’d carved for John and the rabbit Elsie had requested he propped by their pillows and went back downstairs. He’d scarcely settled into a highbacked chair in the drawing room when he caught Carrie’s rapid tread in the hall beyond.
‘This beautiful afternoon, I thought we might have tea in the garden,’ she began. ‘It may be the last time this year.’
She was pale still, in spite of that brisk manner, he observed as he kissed her. It would be no bad thing for her to get away to the sun. The doctors had forbidden Rud to spend another winter in England.
‘There’s a nip in the air these mornings’ he agreed. ‘Have you two made up your minds and fixed your travel plans?’
He wound a scarf about his neck before leaving the house. It was touching, the way Carrie took his arm as they stepped outside. Like him, she sniffed with pleasure at the faint taint of bonfires in the air. Then she turned a troubled face towards him.
‘It looks as though we’re going to South Africa. Rud’s mad for it, though I’m not so sure.’
‘South Africa? Now? But we’re at war there – what can Rud be thinking of?’ he stood staring. What was the poor fellow up to now?
‘I don’t know. Though he does say we’d be quite safe at Cape Town, the fighting’s all further north,’ Carrie answered quickly.
‘Still defending him,’ Lockwood thought, and patted her square, practical hand where it lay on his sleeve.
‘I’m glad to see him showing enthusiasm for anything, frankly. We could have gone to India, you know, but he shied away when the Viceroy invited him. Drooped and said there was no-one he knew there any more and Viceroys weren’t really his thing. “I’ve no interest in their monkey chatter.”’
Lockwood allowed her to see his surprise.
‘Don’t you have any interest in the country yourself?’
She looked embarrassed.
‘Of course I do. But I’ve never felt I could compete with India. It wouldn’t answer our troubles, going there together. He’d forget me in all that blaze of colour and light, the temples, the fascination. I’d sink out of sight.’
That couldn’t be right. He gave a dissenting grunt then walked her up and down the path again in silence.
‘Why South Africa, though? The South of France’d be more convenient, surely.’
‘You can’t have missed the way Rud roused up, came to life, as the situation with the Boers worsened?’
He hadn’t put two and two together. The whole business of fighting the Boers bothered him. England laying down the law to two independent republics on the other side of the world.
‘When war was declared, just now, he was positively elated,’ she went on, growing pink.
In his concern Lockwood stood stock still.
‘Carrie, that sounds quite morbid. Are you sure?’
‘Perfectly sure. I wish I wasn’t. He’s fretful now that things aren’t going better for our side. “I’ve got to go down there to see for myself what’s going on,” that’s what he keeps saying.’
A soft whistle from Lockwood. He stamped his feet, they were going to sleep.
‘Rud pores over the reports in The Times. The gazetteer’s kept on the breakfast table these days. He really intends us to go out there.’
Lockwood shook his head.
‘What sort of life could you have there?’ was all he could say.
Her reply seemed reluctant.
‘We have got friends in Cape Town. From last year, when we went out to warm up after Rock House. And Mr. Rhodes did make an enormous fuss of Rud – special trains to see the diamond mines, a visit to his own country, Rhodesia – it could be a useful distraction.’ Then, in a rush, ‘But I don’t want the children mixed up…’
She was close to tears, he could tell.
Looking up, he saw Rud coming in the gate.
After tea, Carrie left them together and they went off to the study. Once the door was closed behind him Rud immediately asked, ‘Trix?’
Lockwood was unable to prevent his despair from showing.
His son’s face fell.
‘Don’t make me go into detail.’ Lockwood managed, flapping his hands. ‘It’s doing me good to get away for a few hours.’
‘Isn’t there anything that seems to help her? I can’t bear knowing she’s so unhappy and so – like this…’ Rud’s voice trailed off. ‘I wish you’d let me come over to talk to her, I might –’
‘Don’t think of it,’ Lockwood interrupted. ‘Not till we’ve got her a good deal calmer.’ Catching a look of hurt in Rud’s eyes, he added ‘I know how much she means to you. But you’ve no idea how agitated she gets, even the stir of a curtain against the sill can upset her. Be patient for a little while, do.’
They sat in silence. Lockwood was beginning to relax once more when he realised that Rud was not at ease. He’d be about to speak then turn away in silence.
From his seat near the desk, Lockwood watched and waited as he paced back and forth.
At last, ‘Don’t think I’m off my head too. I’m afraid I’m seeing things again.’
Lockwood shrank inwardly – what now? – but attempted to appear unperturbed.
Apparently encouraged by this placid response, Rud went on.
‘I see a little girl with long fair hair –’ Rud’s voice caught in his throat.
So that was it. Lockwood’s alarm abated.
‘You mean you seem to see Jo,’ his father prompted.
‘I tell you I do see her. I don’t seem to see anything. I see Jo when I look out, without thinking, into the garden.’
Coming to a halt he faced his father.
Silence. Lockwood looked at him doubtfully. But there was none of the frantic quality that Lockwood dreaded when he saw it surfacing in Trix. Rud wasn’t ill. He seemed if anything doomed or resigned. ‘Every time?’
‘Unless I remember to brace myself, to shut it out, to shut her out. I did try that once but not again. I’ve failed her too badly already. I was her father. What sort of father lets a child die without even knowing it’s happening?’ he asked, his voice hoarse. Turning away sharply he blew his nose.
Lockwood went rigid. If the cap fits. That story, Baa Baa Black Sheep. What if…
Then he gathered his wits, came back to the present and shook his head. ‘No, Rud, no. You were ill.’ They had gone over this ground before.
Lockwood bit down on the stem of his pipe. ‘Let me get this straight. Jo is… for you Jo is’ – he didn’t want to yield too much ground – ‘she appears to be playing in the garden here at The Elms, just as she used to.’
‘Under the cherry tree, most often but sometimes on the swing.’ Rud took a chair, speaking more slowly now. ‘It’s like a drug. Before we got home, when I was still recruiting in New Jersey and then away fishing with Frank, I kept coming back, underneath, to the fact that she’d gone. I could not take it in. And then when at last I did – just to see her again, just – and then we got back to The Elms and I found that I could. It’s tearing me to pieces. At first, you know, the relief, I thought that I’d die of joy. But now, I’m beginning to be afraid.’
Lockwood cleared his throat.
‘Carrie doesn’t see… her?’ Remembering his little dead granddaughter, he couldn’t get out the word ‘it’.
‘No. As we came through the gate, that first day in October when you were there to meet us – I had a feeling she was waiting for us – and when I first looked out from inside the house, there she was. Carrie heard me exclaim. I didn’t say anything, just pointed. And she – well, she thought that I was simply admiring the colour in the parthenocissus. She decided I seemed overexcited and might be getting a fever. I was sent off to lie down.’
For all his dismay, Lockwood couldn’t help laughing. ‘My boy, I think it’s a good thing that you’ve got round to telling someone about this.’
‘I’ve kept putting it off. You know how I feel about spirit-writing, getting in touch with the dead. It’s done for Trix, I’m sure. Half-lit rooms and dreadful women preying on decay and despair. And this – Jo – I couldn’t bear –’
He was gripping the arms of his chair.
‘No, Rud, no. Little Jo out in the garden, it’s a million miles away from all that.’ In spite of himself he longed to know more. ‘Does she always look the same?’
Rud seemed surprised. ‘No, I don’t think she does. I haven’t questioned it but her clothes do change. I believe, come to think of it, that her hair sometimes looks different. Ribbons and so on.’
Lockwood nodded. He allowed the silence to grow as he slowly relit his pipe.
‘You know, I don’t see that you can go on like this. For one thing, I think you might be hurting Jo.’
Rud’s fingers, which had been picking at some loose threads on his waistcoat, became still. ‘Hurting her? Hurting Jo?’
‘You know, I don’t much like what I’ve seen of how these things are managed here at Home. The English and their ghosts, their heaven and hell. There’s something altogether cleaner about the Oriental way. They’d just accept that the individual life doesn’t come to an end but moves on to take different forms.’
‘You think I’m stopping her, preventing Jo from moving on?’ His gaze was intense.
‘Stopping each other maybe? But think it over, Rud. See if it seems to fit. It might be time – might be wise – for you to leave The Elms.’
‘I see. I’d never thought of it like that. I see.’ The words came out slowly.
Again Lockwood waited, puffing away.
‘And meanwhile, have you told Carrie about this?’
‘I haven’t said anything to Carrie. It would only make her agitated – she quite evidently doesn’t see Jo – and why me and not her? And I can’t anyway.’ A smothered sigh.
‘Can’t? You don’t like to in case she doesn’t believe you?’
‘Or worse – thinks I’m heading towards a breakdown – poor girl, she’s constantly on the watch for signs of anything in that direction. No, it’s not just that. We don’t speak of Jo. Carrie decided it was better so.’
His father was slow to respond.
‘And is that what you think too?’ he wanted to ask. But glancing up, he caught Rud’s mouth working. Lockwood kept his peace.
Instead, lowering his head and poking away at his lowered pipe as though he couldn’t get it to draw, he began,
‘Do you remember when I was staying with you in Naulakha when Jo was still quite tiny? Those little rabbit fur slippers someone sent her – she was so pleased with herself when she learned how to pull them off? I can see her now, sitting up on that big cloth with the animals on I painted for her – laughing away when we pretended to scold her, just waiting for you to put them back on then tearing them off with a shriek?’
It had worked. Rud interrupted.
‘Yes. And did you ever see how once she could get about she used to crawl round with one of them in her mouth? It looked so like a cat with a mouse dangling from its jaws.’
‘Mouse?’ repeated Carrie in alarm, as she entered the room, her son in her arms. ‘Don’t say the word. We’ve only just got rid of the last one. Oh, this fug of smoke,’ waving in protest.
She crossed the room to open a window.
Turning, she continued ‘I’ve brought John in to see his grandfather. I thought he’d like a little masculine company.’
But the little wretch pressed his face against her shoulder and wouldn’t look up. Lockwood had to woo him with sly tickles before he consented to be handed over. After that he settled down to tugging at his grandfather’s woolly white beard.
She moved back to stand beside her husband. Looking up at her, he announced, ‘The Pater thinks we should move out of The Elms. We’ve been very happy here –’ he appeared to have difficulty in going on – ‘but we should be thinking of finding somewhere else, that is, somewhere of our own.’
He was sweating. She knew the windows should have been opened earlier.
‘Why that’s just exactly what I’ve been telling you.’
She hadn’t meant to sound shrill. Her resentment was already giving way to elation. A house of their own again! She grew cautious. It would all fall on her, as usual, you could be sure.
‘Still, we can’t do anything about finding a house right now. My hands are full with all the planning for South Africa.’
She stood by Rud’s shoulder, watching as Lockwood coaxed Rud into playing with his son.
Carrie had no intention of wasting Lockwood’s prompt. That evening she returned to the subject.
‘Next spring, after South Africa, we can get down to a serious search. Maybe that would provide some use for that automobile you insisted on ordering.’
‘The Lanchester? A test of it, rather. They haven’t got the engineering quite worked out yet on these machines. Endless mechanical failures. But don’t you go pretending you weren’t intoxicated by that spin Harmsworth gave us in his Mercedes. I can’t wait, myself. They’ve promised me that the driver they’re sending us is one of their most experienced men. He can take us about the country, once we get back from South Africa. The hunt is up –’
Carrie was pleased, even delighted, by her own ingenuity.
* * *
Rud stretched his legs right out under the cool sheet, hugging the knowledge that outside, Cape Town was already heating up under a blazing February sun. Apart from Carrie’s even breathing in the other bed, the room was remarkably quiet. The gardens of this new hotel, the Mount Nelson, were successfully insulating it from the noisy streets. Gardens, pink walls and balconies. Not Africa at all, what could they be after, the proprietors? A Mediterranean flavour, perhaps. Set up for tourists, not men with work to do. Remembering the officers lounging about the hotel, when the family arrived some days earlier, he was surprised all over again. You’d have thought they might have business elsewhere.
He was just able to make out the bold stripes of shadow on the nearest column beyond the window. As he watched, they moved the least little bit. Turning his head against the pillow he reached for his spectacles. Was it a creature making the tree move? The shadowy branches sprang bouncing together and he laughed aloud. Her eyes still shut, Carrie murmured, ‘That’s the way to wake up, you laughing beside me.’
But he was already out of bed, hoisting at his pyjamas. Carrie still hadn’t completed the supervision of the unpacking. ‘Not in the wardrobe,’ she advised as he flung open doors. ‘You’ll find what you need for today laid out in the dressing room.’ The bedroom door closing behind him, in a moment through the wood came the sound of splashing.
She held her breath. Would he sing?
By such minute calibrations she was tracing his recovery.
Out of the question, to let him see her own despair. Nothing was to be gained by that, though Jim Conland, who was so good to them in New York last year, disagreed. When she’d laid out her plan. ‘It may do more harm than good in the long run,’ he’d responded, walking beside her in Central Park where he sent her to get some fresh air. It was disappointing. She’d hoped for one moment of appreciation, even, as she bound herself to silence. She could admit as much, looking back. She’d not been able to make him budge. But for all Jim Conland was a medical man, Carrie felt that she was the one who knew what was best for Rud.
When Jim had gently attempted to warn her about trying herself beyond her strength, she’d flashed out at him: ‘In my family, we don’t allow misfortune to break us. I’m not the first mother to lose a child.’
She had to fight against remembering Josephine here in Cape Town. Jo’d been with them, when they were here before. Only two years ago. It felt like a century. On her first afternoon she’d been attacked – any other word would have been too weak – by the memory of her daughter, five years old, laughing as she ran barefoot towards the sea. But today when Jo turned, it was not to wave but to stretch out her arms, full of longing.
A groan broke from Carrie’s lips. She should never have let Jo go.
The housekeeper had been passing along the terrace on her rounds. ‘My heavens, that woman’s about to fall,’ and she’d stepped forward with a supporting arm. ‘Mrs. Kipling, ma’am’, would you care to sit down? Come ma’am, lean on me, here we are,’ and Carrie had sunk onto a convenient bench.
She’d been mortified. ‘Thank you so much. The heat, you know, I’m not accustomed to it. In a day or two…’
A knock on the door: round it came the dimpled brown elbow of the maid, braced against the weight of a tray. Heaven, to be putting up in this delightful place with no servants of her own to plague her. Carrie gathered herself, reaching for the light shawl on the nightstand, before raising herself to sitting. A few minutes later, when Rud appeared, fully dressed, she was smiling up at him as she sipped her tea.
He bent to kiss her cheek. ‘What a pretty little woman it is this morning.’ It might be a good day. Even as the tentative hope formed, she felt his hand move to her shoulder, stroking slowly. Her head tilted back, eyelids fluttering. ‘Well, well, old girl, perhaps later,’ and the hand was withdrawn. ‘I’ll take my tea on the verandah; it’s so beautiful out there.’
Biting her lip, she watched the light curtain he had drawn blowing behind him. She pushed the tray out of the way and swung her feet down to the smooth cool floor.
An undercurrent of woodsmoke in the air, a bright edge to the morning: Rud felt something in himself settle. He looked round with delight in his eyes. Weaverbirds were building in that mango tree. He must tell Trix how it brought back their garden in Bombay. Then a weight sank him. The Trix who’d played with him, the girl he’d grown up with, had vanished, leaving a pitiful creature in her place. He swallowed. With grim concentration he turned back to the weaver birds and their nests.
Those festoons of dusty gourds had entranced the kids when they came out on holiday last year. He checked himself. Not last year, two years ago. Before. Hurriedly he stepped forward into the benevolence of the sun.
Wandering, he passed beyond the gardens which lay glistening from their early watering and made his way round by the service quarters of the hotel. As he passed the kitchens he could hear a discreet clattering. Squeals of laughter or a deep-voiced exclamation broke through now and then. If this were really India, instead of seeming so close to it, bringing back sensations that ran soothing and sharpening through his veins like a pipe of opium, then he would have understood the speech in the background.
How good to look up and see solid blue, to have left behind those pallid streets overhung with grey skies, the world that could slow the wheels of his being almost to a stop. Allah be praised, he had escaped from England. The words echoed in his head with such passion that he did not notice his own treachery.
But what was he going to do here, what was the point? The question slipped out, taking him aback. Absurd. He was here to learn what-was-what from the men who knew.
He could hear raised voices followed by cries of, ‘No stop, you’re hurting me!’ from the suite he had just left. Nothing would make Elsie resigned to accept the miseries of her morning toilette. It was hard for little girls, all that long hair that a brush had to drag through. He winced in sympathy at the thought. If it were up to him he’d let her have it all cut off but Carrie put her foot down. He’d better see if she was ready for breakfast.
Struggling to peel a guava, Carrie was aware that Rud was itching to get away. The very day of their arrival, when she’d still been checking off the last of their trunks and baggage to be carried into the panelled entrance hall of the hotel, Rud had stepped away across the lobby to join a knot of newspapermen. Today, before he put down his cup he was already rising from the chair. Her relief at seeing him in spirits, at a glimpse of the old eagerness, made her generous.
Lord Roberts, whom Rud had known back in India, ‘Bobs’ as he was popularly known, had just arrived to take over command of the South African campaign. She wasn’t sure how eager Sir Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner, would be to hear Rud’s advice but she was certain Rud meant to offer it. This war had him in a fever.
She put down her fruit-knife and wiped her fingers.
‘Rud, you’ll need to be off to meet Lord Roberts. And he won’t be the only old friend from India that’s about. Who knows who else you may run into – you’ll be away most of the day, I should imagine. There’s so much going on, I won’t expect you for lunch – I’ll take mine with the children.’
Transparent as ever to her, he seized on this cue for escape. Dropping his napkin, ‘I should look Bobs up, you’re right. And Milner did ask me to be sure to get to the High Commission before too long. Seems to think that I could have a few ideas to contribute: these damned Boers, they’re wiping the floor with us. I can scarcely credit our losses. But things will look up now, you’ll see, with Bobs running the show.’
‘I don’t understand about Mr. Rhodes, though. He’s such a big man over here. What good does it do for him to be cooped up in Kimberley, trapped in the siege? With his weak heart, I’d have thought they’d make sure to get him out.’
‘It’s his vision, Carrie, his tremendous vision. He thinks only of the country and its destiny, never considers his own safety as he should. I know it worries Milner terribly.’
She remained doubtful. It looked like posturing to her. But the arrival of the children, led by their nurse, put an end to conversation. Elsie exploded into giggles as Rud pretended to salaam: blowing kisses to them, he bustled out.
Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar stumped over to the large-scale map on the wall of his temporary office, with its pins and flags showing military positions, and squinted. On the voyage out he’d kept up with dispatches but he must make sure to be absolutely up-to-date before he set off upcountry. As a young officer, he’d served in the Indian Rebellion, while twenty years later in Afghanistan, he’d taken Kabul and relieved Kandahar. Now, just turned seventy, he was supposed to retrieve the British position in South Africa.
It didn’t help that young Fred, his only son, had just been killed in battle. From the day his father had taken over supreme command of this failing campaign he’d been struggling against constant weary misery. Fred. Gone down at Colenso. A drumbeat. This very morning, sitting down on the bed of the wounded officer who’d been riding beside his son the day he died, Lord Roberts had broken down and wept.
He must put all that out of his mind. He checked a place-name in his generals’ reports against the map. He really had enough on his plate without worrying about young Kipling. However famous he was, these days.
But Milner, the High Commissioner, had made a great point of his seeing Kipling, asking it as a personal favour:
‘We need to involve him, you know, make him feel he’s part of the whole enterprise. And you’d be the one to do it. He has the power to get the country – or more of it – behind this war and we desperately need that. Think of the weight his voice carries. His sales are enormous, and better than that, he is really respected because he doesn’t appear to toady. Think of Recessional.’
Remembering Milner’s advice, Roberts snorted: he was not at all sure himself about the meaning of that poem or where its sympathies lay. He knew that he for one was not drunk with sight of power and loosing wild tongues. Where did these writer johnnies get their ideas?
‘Judge of the nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!’
Indeed. And as for asking for an humble and a contrite heart, that seemed to suggest that the home of Empire had something to be sorry about: it wasn’t how he himself saw things at all. Did the fellow believe in England’s mission or didn’t he?
Nevertheless, he would do what he could to forward Milner’s plans. It wouldn’t do to be fighting with the country at home so divided. But who would have thought that the young sprig who was so full of himself a dozen years or so past at Simla would have come to play such a part in the calculations of the men who really counted?
‘Do be sure to say something about The Absent-Minded Beggar Fund when you meet Kipling,’ Milner had urged. Fred Roberts planned to make it his opening move.
When, shortly before lunch, an aide-de-camp announced ‘Mr. Rudyard Kipling to see you, Sir’, he was prepared.
Roberts chose to have no chairs in the room where he worked, so there was no question of inviting visitors to sit. It kept conversation brief. After shaking hands:
‘They tell me you’ve raised an extraordinary amount with that poem of yours, Kipling: quite extraordinary. Getting on for a quarter of a million, no? But I believe it’s for the women and children at home, is that correct? Not coming our way out here…’ he allowed himself a tight smile.
The fellow looked a bit thin but face-to-face, he recognised the direct gaze, though it wasn’t as bright as he remembered.
‘Very kind of you, Lord Roberts, remembering those verses of mine.’ Rud bowed. ‘In fact, that’s just what I wanted to talk to you about: I do have access to some of the funds, to be used over here. I was hoping to ask your advice.’
Roberts tapped his riding boots with the papers he was holding.
‘I suppose you want me to give you permission to run about all over the shop, deciding where to spend it, don’t you? You’re not the first young fellow I’ve met over here determined to get to the fighting by hook or by crook. Very well: I can give you a pass that will get you through the lines and into the hospitals.’
Looking up from the desk where he seated himself to scribble, ‘The bearer of this, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, has my permission to proceed wherever he may desire in South Africa and may visit any of the Army Hospitals,’ he raised a hand in warning: ‘I hope you’ve a strong stomach on you, Kipling. It won’t be pretty. But I suppose you have become hardened –’ he came to a halt, embarrassed. It was India and its filth he meant but perhaps Kipling would take it too personally, think he meant the fellow’s own illness and the child’s death.
Apparently not. Kipling stowed the pass in his inside pocket, and put out his hand, saying quietly: ‘I hope you will accept our sympathy.’
Roberts was careful not to speak but bowed and the interview was over.
Alone once more, he turned to the telegrams from Kimberley, under siege since October. The commander of the garrison, Kekewich, was doing a fine job. Excellent man. Precise estimates of food and forage. Probable length of time they could withstand the siege. Numbers of sick: a thousand cases of scurvy among the natives, but thank God only a hundred and twenty of our people with typhoid.
But this Rhodes fellow. A mountebank. Trying to run the show, dictate the military strategy, put pressure on him, Fred Roberts, with his messages. Who did he think he was? Dammit, being rich as Croesus and king of the diamond mines meant nothing, nothing. Authority belonged to Kekewich. Kimberley was under martial law. And rations were dangerously low; look at the health report. Why wasn’t Rhodes turning over the De Beers stores of food and wines?
‘If threat to stability of town arrest Rhodes and imprison,’ he telegraphed Kekewich.
The reply was swift:
‘I will do my best but fear will have great difficulty in restraining Rhodes. Demands definite information on plans for relief column given him. He is quite unreasonable. Rhodes key to the military situation here as large majority of the Town Guardsmen, the Kimberley Light Horse and the volunteers are De Beers employees. He is grossly insulting to myself and British Army: “Your signallers sending out damned rot. You low damned mean cur Kekewich you deny me at your peril.” Then took a swing at me.’
Roberts didn’t need telling that this egotism, this rank treachery, had better not be made public. Keep quiet about division in the ranks. Above all, no word to that boy Kipling. First thing you knew it would be a choice scandal all over the papers. Like the old days.
He had not entirely forgotten ancient scores.
Beneath his affable manner, Rud had been agonisingly aware that Roberts too had just lost a child. The image of the stiff Spartan little figure haunted him.
‘How does the man keep going?’ he marvelled. But then, it wasn’t his fault.
There’s not the guilt with a grown son, dying in battle.
The following day he presented himself early at Government House to see Sir Alfred Milner. In the cool tiled vestibule a waiting secretary hurried forward.
‘Mr. Kipling, good morning to you. Sir Alfred has given orders that you should be sent in to him directly you arrived. I know he is most anxious to see you. If you would care to follow?’
Rud didn’t wait but darted ahead of him and only paused when the stooping figure of Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa and Lieutenant-Governor of the Cape Colony, stepped forward from a doorway further down the hall.
‘My dear Kipling!’ The voice was languid but he assumed that was a matter of habit. Not every visitor, as Rud knew, would have been met in the hallway.
‘Sir Alfred! Tremendously good of you to make time for me.’
A limp hand slithered through his own.
‘On the contrary, my dear fellow, I’ve been on tenterhooks till you arrived.’ The secretary, panting slightly, had caught up with them but was waved away. Rud waited until he was out of sight.
‘Capable?’ he raised an eyebrow inquisitively. ‘Doesn’t strike me so.’
Milner appeared taken aback. Not used to having a man he could talk to on equal terms out here, probably. Clearly, he was going to appreciate all the advice Rud could offer him.
Once the tray of softly chinking glasses was deposited on the magnificent stinkwood table, Milner dismissed the Malay servant in his white uniform, crossing the room to check that the door was closed. He gestured towards the cool jug with its beads of moisture but Rud shook his head. Iced drinks made his teeth hurt.
‘In a little while, perhaps.’
They moved by silent consent over to the desk where a sheaf of papers was held down by an ammonite paperweight. Milner moved it aside, spreading them out, as he began to explain.
‘Rhodes is still able to use the telegraph to keep in touch, so we have a pretty good idea of the state of things in Kimberley. His reports are confidential, of course, but I’d be extremely obliged if you would cast your eye over them. Tell me what you think – I’m less sure about what’s going on in Mafeking and Ladysmith.’
Milner coughed.
‘Not happy with the military interpretation?’ Rud asked, confidentially. He picked up a sheet to peer more closely. ‘It’s not always the pick of the army that finds itself in command. Well, thank God for Rhodes: there’s one man we can trust for information from upcountry. But everything I’ve heard at home makes me puzzled.’
It was getting warmer, even inside with these high ceilings. Between his shoulders his shirt was sticking.
Milner was nodding thoughtfully but he remained silent.
‘We outnumber these Boers, our troops are disciplined, while they’re a mere rabble, we’ve even got better weapons, and yet we’re still not making headway. What’s Buller been doing? He’s been out in the field for months without anything to show for it but losses. You do know that the papers have taken to calling him Sir Reverse Buller?’
‘All that will change now,’ Milner’s voice was smooth, confident. He began gathering the scattered papers together. Rud hadn’t quite finished.
‘When I heard Bobs was being sent out here, I thought, “At last we mean business. The Boer’s got to be put firmly in his place.” It’s absurd for us to let a backward race with its primitive ways stand in our path. The country’s magnificent, it lies waiting to be developed and made fruitful. What a climate – we could grow anything – we’ve both heard Rhodes on his plans for fruit exports. The economy would be transformed.’
When Rud finally paused, Milner agreed with a brief ‘Indeed.’
Motioning his guest to a seat at the desk, from a locked drawer he took out a file and laid it before him.
Rud leaned forward, at the centre of affairs at last.
* * *
Word from Rud was eagerly awaited in Tisbury.
A pass. Lockwood Kipling sighed quietly, as he sat at the breakfast table, reading the letter. On the one hand, anything that could bring some life back into Ruddy’s eyes must be a good thing. But time was when the boy didn’t rely on passes from great personages nor rejoice in them.
He’d reached for the envelope eagerly at the sight of his son’s writing, the more pleased that Alice was late down to breakfast. She would have had it out of his hand before he could reach for the paperknife. Made of yellow jade with a pattern deeply incised, it was one he used to keep on his desk at the Museum in Lahore. Now he fingered it nervously and returned to his reading.
He laid the blue envelope down beside his plate and was staring out into the garden when his wife entered. ‘You’re upset and it’s something to do with that letter’ – it was already between her fingers. ‘But it’s from Ruddy, he’s not well –’
‘Nonsense, my dear. At times you can be much too quick off the mark for your own good. He’s not ill. Sit down now and read it quietly.’
Alice allowed herself to be calmed, though not without directing a meaningful glance at his fingers, still toying with the old jade knife. She poured herself a cup of tea before beginning to read.
There was a smile on her face as she looked up.
‘Dear old chap, he’s really getting carried away. He forgets that it’s no recommendation to me to tell me how much like India it is in Cape Town. But he does sound happy – almost like a boy again. It goes to my heart.’
The grave look he sent across the table silenced her.
‘He’s deceiving himself, you know, comparing it with India.’
‘Deceiving himself?’ She put her cup down. ‘To what end?’
‘Heaven alone knows. But think, Alice. We’re administering India in the interests of the weakest, or at least that used to be Rud’s view: protecting them from the higher castes. But whatever we pretend, it’s gold and diamonds that took us out to the Cape and keep us out there now. India! A pass from Lord Roberts, indeed!’ He pushed his plate away.
‘What possible objection can you have to a pass from Lord Roberts?’ She stiffened.
Her husband reached across and took her hand: ‘Just try to remember how the boy was when he was with us in Lahore. Little friend of all the world.’
‘But most of those people you call his friends weren’t even English and none of them had the least education. They were just – picturesque.’ Her gesture was dismissive.
‘That’s not my point. When the boy would slip through the back streets and bazaars, reporting some of what he saw but by no means all of it in the old CMG, he was doing something useful. I liked him for it.’
‘And you don’t like him now? Working alongside Lord Roberts and Sir Alfred Milner isn’t useful?’
The tea in his cup had gone cold but he drained it anyway.
‘Alice, do try to understand. I don’t like the way he’s lining himself up with the big men. He always used to keep his distance, hold them to account. Don’t you remember?’
‘I remember the times I had to apologise for him and what he wrote.’
‘In those days he wasn’t afraid to disturb, to rock the boat –’
‘I’d say he enjoyed it. If you’re accusing Rud of being some kind of camp-follower, cosying up to the politicians in South Africa, I think you’re quite mistaken.’
Folding her napkin, she rose. ‘It may be true that it’s unlikely he’ll meet many of the native people or get a chance to explore how they live or learn their language – if they have anything more than a system of grunts – but I’m not sure that matters.’
Lockwood shook his head, smiling. It was wrong of him to insist. Poor girl, with all she was still going through with Trix, no wonder she wanted to believe the best with regard to Ruddy. Trix might be well enough to live at home but you couldn’t say she was herself.
Away up in her bedroom, Trix was still in her nightgown. The relief, these last few weeks, not being marched through washing and dressing before she’d got her breath. According to Them, Miss Green had been appointed as her companion but Trix knew better. She was a jailer. Not even a nurse. At last They had agreed Green was no longer needed. Good riddance.
But she didn’t like what she saw when she crossed over to the glass.
Eyes too large, too dark all round them.
Still, she felt strong enough today for The Plan.
She tested the water in the ewer. Quite warm still. If she scrubbed her cheeks till they had some colour first, then she could wash and get dressed. Opening the wardrobe, she took out the grey shirtwaist.
Unbearable, remaining cooped up here, away from the friends she needed to talk to about her work. With Maud Diver and Tom back from India for good, instead of relying on letters she and Maud could work on their novels side by side again.
Where was her purse?
She took it out from behind her pillow.
Plenty of cash.
With no Miss Green eyeing her she’d been slipping her hand into jackets and pockets around the house, even into other purses. Building up funds.
Was her hair perfectly tidy? There must be nothing to draw unfavourable attention, nothing to criticise.
First the train to London, then a cab to the de Morgans’.
Rud was no use to her any more, from all she heard Downstairs. All out for war. How could he take up with these ideas? Any child could see that war was not the way forward for the world.
And no respect from him for the spirit-writing.
She thrust hard at a last hairpin.
Without the dear, dear de Morgans where would she be? They at least were really convinced of its importance for the world. That it could bring fresh understanding of our lives here. Lead to a new understanding of women. Find the way to keep peace between nations.
Some finishing touch. She scanned her dressing table. A ribbon?
The very thought of speaking with the de Morgans, even perhaps of sitting down to join them in some trance-writing, brought tears of relief to her eyes.
But she must be sure not to let Them know what she had in mind.
Hearing Trix’s step in the hallway, Lockwood, still at the table, braced himself for her entrance. Though she was wan she was neatly dressed, a crimson ribbon round her throat the only jarring feature. She gave a tense smile, bright and placating.
‘I thought I’d just slip up to town to see my publisher, later this morning, take the midday train.’
Lockwood’s head dropped forward. He couldn’t bear to watch, she was so transparent. That Trix should make such a sad little bid to deceive them. He could have wept.
‘I am going up to town, Father,’ she repeated. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
It was Alice who broke the silence: ‘Trix, my darling, I’m not sure this is the day for it, you’re not well enough yet, we can send a little note to your publisher –’
Lockwood could not let this pass. All three of them knew that Trix was really after time with the de Morgans. And with those paintings of theirs that she’d been writing poems about. Of all people, she must be kept from them. No more of their encouragement for those trance experiments.
‘Alice, no, you’ll have us as mad, that is as confused, as Trix. There is no publisher, no appointment.’
At once the pale lips opened startlingly wide, in a high thin cry. When it stopped Trix stood braced before them, glittering-eyed.
‘You won’t let me have any friends. How can you be so cruel?’
Lockwood made his escape. Since Alice insisted that she alone knew the secret of calming Trix, there was no place for him.
Once in his workshop, slowly wrapping himself in his old studio apron, he revolved the possibilities. He had some clay that was ready for wedging. As he steadily rocked the heavy mass preparing to knead it, his mind cleared. They would have to think of getting the nurse-companion back. But Alice was so intent on keeping the care of Trix within her own control, so ready to declare a fixed improvement. To his eyes, each apparent period of stability merely turned out to have been a deception, a disappointment, like the healing over an ulcer that breaks down yet again.
* * *
At Milner’s invitation, Rud was dropping by every morning to see him at Government House. That left only the afternoons to fill. Today, after lunch, it was his day for visiting the General Military Hospital. He had a regular routine between hospitals going now. At the entrance he collared an orderly and handed over a pack of tobacco for distribution round the wards. The Absent Minded Beggar Fund, had supplied it but he didn’t have to deliver every single tin himself. He’d found a better way of helping out here.
It disturbed him, though, not being able to help Trix. He’d tried writing to her more than once, brief notes, meant to steady her.
‘My very dear Trix
It makes me sad to think of your unhappiness.
Please remember how much you mean to me always.
Your devoted
Brother.’
But he’d had to stop. He’d been told she refused even to touch the envelopes.
The reek of Jeyes’ Fluid brought him to a halt. Like a punch on the nose. But comforting too, a smell from childhood, Bombay, wet floors after the sweepers had been through.
‘I thought I’d make myself useful by writing, taking down letters, today. D’you think that would be an idea, Sister?’ he asked, catching a tall woman in dark uniform dress as she hurried past.
‘Just what they could do with. We’re all rushed off our feet, not a moment to sit down with anyone unless, you know, at the very end. Thank you, Mr. Kipling.’ She was off.
A young nurse, emerging from behind a screen, suggested he should go first to the patient at the end on the right. She sketched the background.
‘His arm had to come off, this morning. The bullet had absolutely shattered it,’ she whispered finally, pushing back tendrils of hair under her white cap, ‘we’ve done what we can about the pain but he’s anxious and very restless.’
Rud nodded. He felt inside his jacket for pen and notebook before he made his way down the row of beds. All casualties in here, of course, the fever patients – such numbers of them, a disgrace – were cared for elsewhere.
The man he’d been directed to was youngish, about his own age. Shock-headed, his hair still full of the dirt from the fall he must have taken when his scouting party was ambushed. The tight bandages strapping the stump of his right arm oozed.
He was croaking, his voice altered by shock.
‘What use am I going to be after this? What about the children? Lizzie’s not strong, she’ll never be able to manage,’ he repeated obsessively once Rud sat down.
‘Don’t you think your wife might like to hear from you? That would be something we could manage,’ he began.
The fretting continued as though he hadn’t spoken. Poor fellow, how to distract him?
‘Really, look it’s no trouble,’ Rud insisted, ‘my notebook’s here, never without one and Sister will make sure it gets sent out with the mails.’
‘My dear wife,’ Rud’s pen raced over the paper, following the halting dictation ‘do not be worried getting this, I am getting on well, though in the hospital. Who knows, they may send me home after this. My love to little Betty and the baby, your loving husband Fred Sawbridge.’ He added his own name with a note to explain that the letter was dictated: it was too early to add any honest word of encouragement.
He liked it when he could do that. ‘The details above are entirely correct,’ he’d learned to add, together with his signature. He thought that would be believed, even read by an anxious wife or mother at home.
At the end of the hour he handed over three or four such letters to Sister Vellacott for dispatch and was fifty yards down the street, the sun blistering his unprotected head through his thinning crown, before he realised that he’d left his hat behind. No need to trouble Sister, he thought he knew exactly by which bed he’d left it. As he passed the door to her office he saw it was almost shut. Good, she must be snatching a moment’s rest.
Then he stood rooted with embarrassment on hearing her voice.
‘It is wonderful, the way he never fails us,’ she seemed to be agreeing with someone. ‘There’s nothing he wouldn’t try to get for the men if we said they needed it. But he’s a driven man, can’t you see that?’
It must have been young Nurse Gibbons, he knew that voice too: ‘I wonder you don’t hang on to one or two of those letters, Sister. With Rudyard Kipling’s signature they’d be worth something at home.’
He wanted to hit her. Cheap little bitch.
‘A driven man’. He wanted to hide. His failure was written all over him. His knees were trembling as he moved away to pick up his straw hat.
He had to force himself to go back after that. No letting those fellows down, whatever he was feeling. Sometimes it was pretty fierce, the sense of pointlessness. What was he good for, after all?
‘Taking down their words quite unaltered may be useful but it takes no skill,’ he grumbled to Carrie, more than once. ‘A child could do it.’
‘You must know it means a lot to them. Especially when they find out who you are,’ she told him in the end.
‘I’m not proud of myself for enjoying that,’ he returned, flatly.
Yet he managed to keep up the hospital visits.
‘Stocks of pyjamas are desperately low, Mr. Kipling, or I wouldn’t ask you,’ Sister Vellacott approached him awkwardly. ‘I don’t know where I’m going to find the next pair. And there’s another hospital train due in this evening.’
‘Leave it to me,’ he replied with mechanical confidence. The Absent-Minded Beggar Fund was raising enough to subsidise any number of pairs.
But once at the General Stores, the bristling little Welsh quartermaster he approached, one man at least who clearly did not recognise him, thought otherwise.
‘Any dispensing of goods requires a chit, followed by an invoice from a company officer. Two days notice is usual and delivery will take place the following week,’ he rattled off.
The resistance, all unexpected, jolted him to life.
What next? He could easily obtain a note from Staff and blast the man with authority. Yet something in him recoiled. Besides, there might be a little fun to be had in remaining unofficial. He cast a thoughtful eye about him as he wandered off, all apparent submission. Sure enough, he caught sight of turbaned figures slipping between the tents, a folded stretcher carried between them.
Calling out a greeting in Hindustani, he hurried to catch up with them. There was intense pleasure in feeling the words come alive in his mouth. Incredulous and delighted, ‘Who would think to hear the tongue of Hind in this country where there are no gods?’ one exclaimed, laying down his burden. In two minutes they were his accomplices.
Of a certainty they would find what the Sahib desired. But not pyjamas only? Was there nothing more they could obtain for him quietly, quietly from the godown?
Rud restrained himself. No need to load up with spare tobacco for the men. The supplies ordered out from England were nowhere near exhausted.
‘Pyjamas only, brothers. Who are we to rob the poor?’
The stretcher-bearers were still grinning when they returned under a load of striped flannel bound up with broad tapes.
‘One half gross, counted,’ they told him proudly.
Handing them over to Sister Vellacott was a moment of triumph. He scarcely knew when he’d felt so pleased at what he’d pulled off. School, maybe, with the fellows in Number Five Study?
He got a laugh out of the men as well, going up to her in the middle of them all and declaring, ‘Sister, I’ve got your pyjamas.’
She looked almost pretty, blushing.
‘The difference, Carrie, the difference,’ he exclaimed. They were taking a stroll after tea, among the palms and strelitzias of the Company’s Garden, a short distance away from their hotel. ‘A few minutes with those stretcher-bearers and I was reminded. The local people here can’t hold a candle to them.’
Carrie had been reading the labels on an unfamiliar shrub, so hadn’t been paying attention.
‘Local people? The Boers?’
‘Not at all. I meant the natives, the blacks. The Boers are all too like what we have at home – I mean, what I knew as a child and hated – smug piety, Biblical texts with all the time an eye for the main chance. And ugly!’ Under his vicious kick a pebble shot away down the path.
‘I’ve lost the thread,’ Carrie murmured, puzzled, ‘Can we go back? You were telling me about Lord Milner and what he had to say.’
These sessions with Milner, a man who was worth talking to, invigorated him, though he suspected she failed to see their importance. She just wanted him occupied, not moping.
‘Tell me again,’ she repeated. Nothing pleased him better. It helped to arrange his ideas.
‘As I was saying, Milner thinks we can get through this – always assumed the damned War Office sends through the funds and they get the hospitals sorted out. We can get a local government in place on terms that suit both sides. We just have to leave out the question of the blacks.’
‘The blacks?’ she asked with transparent caution. He was sure she’d heard him the first time.
‘Yes, yes, naturally, the blacks,’ he nodded, trying not to sound irritable. ‘In theory, of course, we should think about enfranchising them, land rights and so on. That’s certainly what those airy intellectuals, the Liberals, want. Opinion out here would never hear of it. And if we want a united southern Africa, to create a union here, one in which we are acknowledged as the Mother Country, we have to find common ground. It’s the union of the two races, those of Dutch inheritance and ourselves, that must be the goal.’
Carrie kept tugging at the lace on her cuff as he was explaining.
He could see her struggle to contain herself, hear the effort behind her even voice. ‘But Rud,’ she began, ‘Rud, have you forgotten Vermont? In Brattleboro you seemed red hot for anti-slavery, like the rest of us.’
‘Well, so I am but we’re not talking about slavery here. We’re talking about governing natives, blacks with no more tradition or culture than a tent and a blanket. Not fit by a mile to hold land, certainly not to vote –’
She came in before he’d finished speaking
‘How do you know that, Rud? What do we know of these people? It’s the Malays we see most of and the woman who does our washing is sharp as a knife. Have you ever exchanged two words with one of those black people you’re so quick to write off?’
She was walking so fast he had to hurry to keep up with her.
‘Carrie, you really are absurd. I’m perfectly aware that some of them can read and write. We couldn’t use them as interpreters else. But exceptions are neither here nor there.’ Before she could speak again he went on. ‘Believe me, this is out of your ken. We’re talking about political life as it is carried on between nations, the governance of the empire. Small things must give way to greater.’
She stopped in the middle of the path.
‘And I to you? You’ll never convince me, Rud. If you’d heard those views uttered on an upcountry railway platform rather than in Government House you’d have been appalled.’
How well she looked, all at once, alive with energy. He was conscious of warmth in his own cheek, too. In the silence, however, a strain in his breathing could be heard. It was a sign they both recognised. Time to draw back.
‘It’s a beautiful afternoon, Rud. Won’t you come with me down to Muizenberg and surprise the children? They’ve been spending the day on the beach with Nurse Lucy.’
He might as well. Get a sight of the kids down on the sand, earnestly digging away and happy. Anything to replace those images of a wan and haunted Trix that every letter from his father reinforced.
* * *
At home in Tisbury, it was a damp, cool late summer, with mould taking over the borders. In spite of this, Alice was in good spirits, for Trix appeared much less agitated recently.
She sat quietly beside Alice in the breakfast room, for more than an hour that afternoon, looking through old photographs together, without a sign of restlessness. Alice felt the need for change though. She began to hope that the weather would clear, so they could go outside.
‘It’s really too miserable for the garden, even for the sake of some air. Every branch and stem out there is dripping with wet,’ she acknowledged reluctantly at last.
Slowly she reached for her sewing. How long was it since she’d dared to put a pair of scissors within her daughter’s reach?
‘I don’t know whether you’d care to help me with this? You’re such a needlewoman, Trix. But it does take concentration and you may not feel up to it.’
There, she had taken the risk.
But Trix was fingering a corner of the voluminous white linen tablecloth almost eagerly.
‘It’s very pretty, the design you’ve been working, Mama. And the single faggot stitch along the borders, I’ve always been fond of that.’
Deftly threading a needle, Trix began sewing, pausing only to hold up the hem to check she was keeping her stitch even.
‘What good progress we’ve made together,’ Alice ventured, smiling, as the clock struck for tea.
Trix looked back at her.
‘I wish we could do some writing together, Mama.’
‘Wouldn’t that be fun, darling? Poems? Just as you and Ruddy used to?’ Alice trod gingerly.
‘Ruddy and I? No, I meant spirit-writing. You know I did. You were always boasting about having “the sight”, Mother. Well, let’s put it to the test. Let’s plan to do some trance-writing together, find out what comes through –’
Alice stopped breathing for a moment, then spoke carefully.
‘Now Trix, you know that wouldn’t be wise. Everyone agrees –’
‘Everyone: you mean Jack and Rud and Father. They hate me. You all hate me.’
And Trix was standing, the billowing folds dropped, forgotten crushed beneath her feet. Her hands at her temples, she was dragging and tearing at her own hair.
By the time Lockwood rushed in, drawn from the other end of the house by her cries, Trix had succeeded in ripping out a real tuft and blood was trickling onto her forehead.
* * *
The war was going better at last: Kimberley and Ladysmith relieved, Bloemfontein captured. Having caught up with Rhodes, when he was still fresh out of Kimberley, Rud was late for dinner when he got back to the Mount Nelson. But he couldn’t wait to pass on news of the great man’s intentions.
He was struggling into his dress-shirt as he spoke.
‘Do you know, Carrie, he’s got a scheme to build a house for us out near his own place, near Groote Schuur.’
To his astonishment, she looked cross.
Without speaking, she turned back to her dressing table and put in an extra hairpin.
Facing him once more ‘I don’t have any wish to form part of Mr. Rhodes’ plan for South Africa, myself,’ she began.
‘You don’t understand,’ he hurried. ‘It’s my fault, I haven’t explained properly. You know he’s planned Groote Schuur with an eye to the years to come. British and Dutch traditions meeting in harmony and all that. A suitable residence for future leaders. Now he wants to create a place for men of the arts, a house they can come out to and live here for part of the year.’
Picking up her evening bag, Carrie got to her feet.
‘And you’re to be his first pet writer?’
‘What’s got into you, Carrie?’ He felt crestfallen as a child. ‘With a regular base we could spend winter out here every year in a home of our own. He made a particular point of saying you must have the final say in everything. It’s dashed generous. Typical of the man.’
He could tell Carrie was merely holding herself in check.
He couldn’t make out what she had to object to.
‘Perhaps we’d better see exactly what Mr. Rhodes has in mind,’ she said at last, taking his arm.
Such misplaced suspicion, she was bound to come round.
Rud even managed to run into Bobs when he made a brief return to Cape Town. The little man, full of renewed energy was striding up and down Milner’s office as he gave the High Commissioner more details of the victory at Bloemfontein.
‘Ah, Kipling, just the man I want to see,’ he exclaimed as Rud was shown in. ‘We need to make the men feel civilised again. A newspaper for them, that’s what I’ve in mind. Gwynne of Reuters and Landon of The Times with one or two others have agreed to set it up. You know how much your name would mean to the men, Kipling. Would you consider joining the team for a week or two up in Bloemfontein?’
He didn’t needed asking twice. That night he took the rattling train north.
The next morning, however, leaning out of the window to breathe in the dry scents of the veld, as they approached Bloemfontein he drew back, catching the stink of typhoid. His heart beat faster. India had taught him what that meant.
Later, after a bath and a change of clothing, he walked about town exploring and asking questions. Bobs had taken over the parliament, the Raadzaal, as a hospital, but even that wasn’t going to suffice. From the hastily painted signs outside them, it looked as though many houses had also been commandeered.
‘Three hundred and fifty patients lying almost directly on the bare ground with only three doctors and not a single nurse to be seen: that damned Surgeon-General didn’t fancy the idea of ladies in the wards,’ Gwynne told him, when he arrived at the paper’s little makeshift office.
‘It’s a confounded disgrace,’ Rud agreed. Odd that Milner hadn’t spoken of it as a problem. Rud didn’t feel like pursuing that, so he pushed the thought away.
Why was there something to make him angry everywhere he turned? Better angry than sad, though. He was crushed that Trix still didn’t want to hear from him.
‘What shall I do, set up type, read proof, write a poem?’ Rud called out to the other men. He was full of go, ready for anything. This was like stepping back into the familiar office, the duftar at the CMG.
Together they plotted to get past the censors, how to coax copy out of the Tommies and their officers.
‘We’ve got to sniff out any chap whose friends suspect him of scribbling in private. It’ll be good for morale to get work from the men into print,’ urged Banjo Paterson.
‘Go on, Kipling, you’d better hunt them up.’
It was exactly what he used to enjoy, getting the soldiers talking. It came so easily to him. He felt no older than the youngest of them.
Back in the office, with Gwynne and the others, he fought with the ancient printing press.
‘How the dickens this was ever made to function defeats me,’ Landon growled cheerfully, ink to his elbows.
‘Never such larks,’ Rud exclaimed, then more softly, ‘not for years and years.’
Once up near the front, he’d meant to get closer to the fighting, though somehow after a week he still hadn’t seen action. Maybe in a day or two. It hardly seemed to matter, nothing did, working with the others on the paper they’d named The Friend.
The riot of laughter in their dusty little cubby-hole put him in mind of Number Five Study more than once. He was starting to feel something like his old self. I’m glad I didn’t die last year in New York,’ he found himself writing.
The hideous dreams that he was back in court had stopped. Writing back to Carrie in Cape Town he must remember to let her know. He’d seen how she fed upon these signs of health. He was coming back to life, or was it his old life, all his old life that was coming back to him and clicking into place?
‘I’m joining up all my ideas with the others of many years ago,’ he told her.
The evenings in the Club – more accurately a makeshift mess, set up in the Free State Hotel – were the time for listening to the stories of the men returned from that day’s skirmishing on the veld.
Rud’s heart kicked with pleasure as he stepped over the threshold into the irregular shadows of the lamplight. The mess servants had set up a long table: the choice of drinks was limited but the room would fill up with talk and men. Tobacco smoke was bad for him, he’d been warned. Conland had frowned when he’d refused to give up his own pipe. Now each evening the warning tightness in his chest after half an hour amid the deepening blue haze told him that it was time to leave.
His breathing was already turning scratchy when Gwynne, who had been out of the office with a scouting column, came in and was waved over to the table. Rud had been listening to the chaplain argue with a young officer who was outraged by the way his men had been punished for stealing horses.
‘It’s not as if they were doing it for private gain,’ he kept protesting. ‘Without a mount they’re no use to anyone.’ Perfectly true: against a mounted guerrilla enemy what use was a man on foot? The lads were joyfully unscrupulous. Every day The Friend carried notices of horses missing or ones discovered riderless, now to be enquired after ‘down by the cricket field’. The schoolboy note entertained him, though the fighting men didn’t seem to notice it.
Gwynne’s arrival caused a pause: all heads turned his way, ears cocked.
He was slow to begin. ‘It’s a bad business,’ he managed finally.
Attention shifted into edginess. A voice to his left was raised cautiously. ‘Many casualties?’
‘Not so bad. No. It’s this business of clearing the farms. Well, we don’t clear them, do we, we burn them. It’s the finish for these people, they’re all farmers, the Boers – they’re just sent off packing into the veld.’
A sombre agreement.
‘It cost me something, I can tell you, to watch this afternoon. The thatch had already caught and the husband, sullen enough, was turning away from the sight. All for getting off – but the woman –’ After a pause, ‘The mother, I should say. Have you ever noticed those little headstones out on the farms? Sometimes two or three of them together? I’d never thought of what they meant before today. That woman would not leave with her husband: instead she went over and knelt, she tried to put her arms round them, round them all at the same time.’
‘And then?’ A voice from the back of the room.
‘She got up without speaking a word so far as I could hear. I had turned away – it didn’t seem right –’
Rud was growing hot. He broke in. ‘It’s a modest enough return for treachery. Once they’ve sworn allegiance, and on the Bible. what can they expect if they’re caught signalling to the other side? Quite apart from the betrayal of that Christian faith they’re always preaching, it’s treason. They’re lucky not to be hanged for it.’
Gwynne appeared astonished to hear him.
But Rud knew about treachery and women in unclean black garments with the Bible language always in their mouths. He remembered how many of his friends from the old days had already met their death out on the hideous emptiness of the veld.
In the uneasy silence that followed his outburst, he became conscious of a faint whistling in his chest. He carefully got to his feet. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ he muttered for anyone who was listening, hand over his sternum, as he made for the door.
Behind him, muted voices rose into new conversations. In a corner, a tall moustached figure nudged his neighbour: ‘Fancy going down to that house off Douglas Street after dinner? Some of those black bitches are stunners, wonderful shape. I’ve asked Landon and he’s definitely on.’
Someone was calling for another round.
‘Anyone ready to take me on at four-to-one that Kitchener will take over as C-in-C before Christmas?’ A red-faced young cavalry officer in field dress was trying to make a book. Meanwhile, a silent figure, a horseman from the Cape Colony sat on blank with dismay.
‘I used to worship Kipling and his writing,’ he’d repeat for the rest of his life, ‘but once I’d actually met the fellow out here during the war and heard what he had to say, I wanted no more to do with him.’
Catching his breath as he stood out in the beaten earth of the street, Rud turned his face up to the immense field of the sky, searching among these southern constellations, once so familiar. It calmed him, tracing over their patterns.
Only a few more days before he must go back to Cape Town. If only he didn’t have to give up the talk and the work in that confounded little office he had grown so fond of. Still, needs must. He drew his hand across his mouth and turned back to the hotel, to go to bed. Carrie couldn’t be expected to cope on her own indefinitely and besides, he was beginning to get a glimmering of something new.
When he got back to London, how he would work, how he would use his voice! His step rang beneath him as he marched up the wooden steps of the hotel. Everything the country had should be thrown into protecting South Africa from these filthy Boers with their hypocrisy and their damned readiness to go back on what they’d promised.
And surely, once he could get over to Tisbury, he’d be able to coax Trix into seeing him.
Back in Cape Town, in the hotel gardens, beneath the shade of a broad parasol, Carrie sat alone.
The sheets of Rud’s letter loose on her lap in the windless noon – she must remember to get no more of that striped cotton, it didn’t wash well – she did not know whether to rejoice or weep: thank goodness that something could put an end to the terrible visitations, when a kind of waking sleep turned Rud into a tossing fever patient. The terror she had known at that time, sleepless herself beside the frantic dreamer, came back and took hold of her again.
The glass beside her was empty. She signaled to the waiting figure in the background.
The dreams were over. But – was it a good sign that he should get this respite only in her absence? Her heart shrank.
The Tommies adored him, she was told, and that must be doing him good. He didn’t seem to mind at all so long as it was soldiers who mobbed him. How different from Brattleboro days.
Stirring more sugar into her lemonade, she took a sip.
Here it actually helped that you could identify him on sight. Yet she herself scarcely recognised the reports that described his ‘sturdy figure’, ‘energetically hauling away’ at cases of supplies to distribute to a train-load of wounded soldiers. It was like the cinematograph, images from the past, moving images of the man she had married. She had thought that man was gone for ever.
But if Rud really were now setting to ‘with a flourish’ – some might say showing off – then that proved her wrong.
She knew she ought to be happy.
* * *
‘Of course, we’ll have to improve the road,’ Cecil Rhodes squeaked in his thin voice.
Carrie looked at Rud in relief. They’d been invited to look at a house Mr. Rhodes had in mind for them at Rondebosch, this village outside Cape Town and the journey up from the main road, brief though it had been, had thrown them about more than she liked. Rather stiffly, she prepared to get down from the open carriage. It wasn’t the first time they’d borrowed it. Light and highly polished, it bore the arms of Sir Alfred Milner on the side, though today they lay under a fresh powdering of pink dust. The footman too had a decidedly pinkish tone.
Mr. Rhodes moved clumsily to hand her down.
‘It is a very great pleasure to have this opportunity,’ he bowed. With a slight struggle she regained her balance and shaped a cautious smile.
It all depended on what Mr. Rhodes meant by the phrase ‘building a house for them’. The old Dutch farmhouse they had come out from Cape Town to inspect was picturesque enough from the outside, though sadly run down. Brilliant creepers trailed down the shuttered windows and mould was growing over the plastered wall by a leaking water butt.
She stirred the sodden earth with her toe.
‘The Woolsack seems such an odd name for a house. But I’m sure there’s a reason,’ she added hastily, conscious of sounding ungrateful.
‘A little joke on the part of the last owner. Nearby there was a much bigger place known as The Woolpack,’ Baker chipped in.
Carrie’s smile was merely civil. She enjoyed living in the Mount Nelson. Only the servants flitting silently in their red fezzes disturbed the European scene. She could imagine herself among the Italian lakes, looking up from the terrace to the tall balconied buildings. Taking up housekeeping in Africa, for goodness’ sake, surely Rud wasn’t asking that now?
And if they were to make do with an inconvenient layout, shabbily finished, she feared that she would have to draw a line.
Rud, of course, was all excitement, as he had been when he first told her of the offer. She was still surprised by that. Here he was, a man who had turned down the Prime Minister’s offer of a knighthood only months back, eager now to embrace special honours from Cecil Rhodes. But maybe it was the offer of intimacy he couldn’t resist.
‘That way we’ll be able to see all we like of each other, without the trouble of setting up dinners and dates,’ Mr. Rhodes enthused.
Carrie wondered what this favoured intimacy would cost. It wasn’t even clear that she herself would gain. It was always Rud that people wanted to please.
With no need of his own for anxiety, Rud was already mounting the long stoep that lay along the front of the building, pausing to kick inquiringly at the edge of crumbling brick.
Rhodes was quick to take the cue: ‘I’ve asked Baker to accompany us this morning because I want him to hear from you yourself and from Mrs. Kipling exactly what works and improvements you require. Mrs. Kipling, I imagine most of the ideas about what is needed will come from yourself.’
She had caught up with them before he had finished, feeling a surge of interest. Rud smiled back at her fondly: ‘She’s the best and most thoughtful woman in the world for planning and contriving, my wife.’
‘I’m going to leave you then, if you’ll allow me,’ Rhodes fumbled a bow and was away on his horse.
Laying her misgivings to one side, Carrie accepted the large iron key Baker offered and put both hands to the task of turning the lock. With a little gasp she felt the two halves of the door part as they swung open.
‘A stable door, at the front! Just as we had at Naulakha! Our house in Vermont,’ she added flushing, embarrassed by the emotion in her voice. She didn’t like revealing so much of herself to a stranger.
‘As a matter of fact, they’re very often to be found out here. Mr. Rhodes likes to keep the original character of these old places: I imagine you won’t object to keeping that style of door?’
‘On the contrary.’ She was looking about her, charmed to find, once inside, that the house was built around an open atrium. ‘It’s not like anything I’ve ever lived in, though now I think of it I believe there’s something like this open courtyard over at Groote Schuur.’
‘There I have the advantage of you, Carrie,’ Rud excited, was pacing out the space. ‘This layout speaks to me of sun and heat, speaks of Bombay, too, in its setting. Even on the hottest day, that marvellous freshness coming up off the sea, over those green plains below us will keep us cool. Relatively, at least, that is,’ he finished.
She too observed Baker’s flitting discomfiture.
She stiffened for a moment in apprehension: were they to stay through into the hot season? Surely not. ‘Rud, darling, you can’t possibly think –’
He turned to her, eyes snapping. She fell silent.
Herbert Baker was trying to attract her attention: ‘I have a few preliminary suggestions, just notes and sketches, but I thought you might like to look at them, here on the spot.’ He cleared the dust from a worn bench that stood along the wall by the side door. ‘We are going to find whether our tastes coincide: these are the lines, rather Arts and Crafts – the place is generous but not grand – I’ve been thinking along.’
It did take her back to Naulakha. In her growing involvement, Carrie didn’t lose her presence of mind.
‘Rud, let me have your handkerchief,’ she called, and spread it out with some care before sitting down. Architect and client looked together down the length of the house.
‘How many bedrooms do you think we could get out of this? And what about somewhere to put the servants? We couldn’t think of living here without the children’s nurses and our own maids.’
Was it going to be worth all the effort, moving the lives of an entire household out here for months every year? That’s what it would mean.
She sat back, staring up at the cobwebs among the rafters.
But then she thought of the children. John was sleeping better. She hadn’t realised how wan Elsie had become these last months, till she saw her brighten and pick up here in the bold sunshine. That settled it. She had to admit Rud was only just when he’d promised her eagerly,
‘It’s got everything, same as Bombay. South Africa’s a paradise for kids.’
* * *
Once back in Rottingdean, Carrie was still determined to start looking for a home of their own. They were lingering at the breakfast table when she decided to tackle him.
‘We have to find a place we can buy, Rud. I’m convinced our landlord here wants to sell. It makes me unsettled.’
She paused to nibble a last corner of toast.
‘The children need to have somewhere to come home to, a place that we can’t be put out of, not one we’re renting. Rushing off to South Africa in the winter is all very well. I’m prepared to agree that Mr. Rhodes and his Woolsack are delightful but I want something of our own.’
‘You’re right, of course.’ Rud was turned away, looking out at the garden. His shoulders slumped. ‘It’s hard, though to feel much enthusiasm when you think what happened last time. Naulakha was perfect. Our very own house and we had to let it go.’
‘For heaven’s sakes,’ for once she allowed herself to lose patience with him. ‘That was five years ago.’ She refused to go over it again, all the trouble with Beatty. The nightmare of the court case. What was the good?
Shamefaced, he began to apologise. ‘It’s this,’ he jabbed at an envelope by his plate. ‘It just makes me feel useless.’
He’d glanced over his father’s letter but stuffed it back inside almost at once.
‘The Pater tries to soften it – “put off visiting for a week or two” – but the long and short of it is, Trix won’t have me.’
‘Can I see the letter?’
It was quite possible he’d jumped to the gloomiest conclusion.
‘“General overexcitement” on her part’s what they’re frightened of, there’s not a word about what Trix wants or doesn’t want.’
‘Are you sure?’ He took the letter back and studied it. Raising his eyes with an embarrassed smile. ‘You may be right.’
‘I do think a nurse would know better than your mother how to keep Trix calm,’ she said, irritated despite herself.
‘I wish to blazes they’d get one. We could always pay for it. All this useless cash sitting in our account. I’ll suggest it.’
That wasn’t what she’d intended at all. A place of their own would cost money. But the idea had made him look much brighter.
‘How wise you are, Carrie. I should always listen to your advice.’
He got up from his chair and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
‘I can tell that you’re in earnest about finding a house. Very well, this afternoon as ever is. Of course the blessed motor car is still suffering from gastritis. But we could take the pony and trap. Get it sent round immediately after luncheon.’
‘Luncheon?’
She hid a smile. Every move he made, linguistic or otherwise, registered with her. He was echoing the patrician Alfred Milner. The mild passing embarrassment of acknowledging that they were now moving in a more exclusive world than ever before, that it was changing them, made her briefly sad.
‘Let’s just have a sandwich. We can set off all the sooner. You pacify Cook: tell her we’ll eat it all this evening.’
She was about to object. Cook was touchy enough as it was and she herself had been to some trouble in ordering the menu for that day. Then she thought better of it. This was her chance. Glancing outside, she saw that the morning drizzle had ceased. Faint shadows on the lawn gave way to weak pledges of sun.
She folded her napkin.
‘While I set about getting something sent up on a tray why don’t you get out your county maps and we’ll plot over them as we eat.’
It became a new pastime, driving out in the afternoons, that summer, after Rud had done his day’s stint on Kim, the story of the boy who was half-Indian, half-British. Almost like a spiritual autobiography, she thought, though she kept quiet.
Were they in the motor or the station fly, when they first saw Bateman’s? They would argue over it happily afterwards. It could have been either, the Locomobile was so often out of action.
Seen from the road, as they drove past, the glimpse of a Jacobean house, discreet in its grey stone, fired them both.
Each turned to the other.
‘Can we go back?’
There was some difficulty in turning in that rabbit hole of a lane. They alighted, all impatience, and walked back up the steep incline. That they both remembered. That and the utter quiet but for the lowing of cows.
A sweep of woods away to the south.
Peering through the gate, ‘Can you make it out, Carrie, is that a date carved over the door?’
‘I’d have to get closer. Sixteen something?’
They stood taking in the sober lines of the place, its rough-mown lawns.
‘Over there to the right, that’s a dovecote, above that brick building.’
‘How ancient and settled it feels. Such dignity,’ Carrie whispered. ‘And yet no grandeur. Only a stone-paved path laid in the turf from here to the front door. A home.’
Rud pushed tentatively at the gate, which dragged on its hinges. The place wasn’t being cared for as it deserved: there were other signs.
‘I do believe it’s rented out to a farmer, not lived in by a family,’ she exclaimed.
There was no need for her to say more.
Gripping her by the elbow, he turned back down the lane.
‘We can find all that out. Let me mark it on my map then we can make enquiries.’
They discovered that the Jacobean house was known as Bateman’s. Though they’d fallen under its spell, Rock House had taught them to be cautious.
‘The past wells and gathers in these old places,’ they told each other. ‘Better take soundings.’
Stepping inside over the black and white tiles of the hall, however, exploring about the panelled rooms, Rud and Carrie found no shadow of old miseries, only calm and welcome.
‘It’s never been meddled with; it’s untouched, intact.’ Rud surprised her by the depth of his relief.
But Bateman’s had just been let for a year. They weren’t sure if they could wait.
They kept looking.
Meanwhile they remained near Georgie in Rottingdean.
Rud did miss having a garden of his own to plan for. He was making do by pottering among the flowerbeds of The Elms when he heard a cry of fury. At three years old, Baby John had developed a mind of his own.
‘No naughty. No.’ He stamped his feet and threw a handful of gravel across the lawn.
‘Johnny,’ his nurse began to plead. His mother, stepping across the garden on her way over to see Georgie, had overheard and now came sailing over.
‘John, do as you are told immediately. A big boy like you! Come here.’
But it appeared there was no going back.
‘No, no, no!’ throwing up his arms, he slipped through the women’s grasp and disappeared among the overhanging bushes.
Carrie turned on the nurse a look of ice.
‘This is not how I expect you to handle his tempers.’
Later, with Rud, she was tearful.
‘I really don’t know what I am to do with him. I just don’t seem to have the energy. Nurse is hopeless, she lets him ride roughshod. Oh, what is to be done with him?’
He had a jolt of alarm. Ridiculous. He knew what to do. First, he rang the bell to summon tea.
‘Would you prefer honey or will the raspberry jam do?’ he asked. Leaving Carrie settled, with the ample tray before her and her book at hand, he set off for the nursery.
He paused outside, attentive. Elsie’s voice rose in fury.
‘Give it back to me, it’s mine.’
A wail. When he opened the door, the first thing he saw was the tuft of blond hair in John’s fist. Scarlet with tears, Elsie was clutching a drooping rag doll to her chest. Nurse Lucy, her arms full of neatly folded clothes, was standing by an open cupboard, helpless but innocent.
Elsie threw herself against him, sobbing. ‘My hair, my hair!’ and looked smugly across at her brother from the shelter of her father’s arms. He stroked her soothingly for a moment, before handing her over to her nurse.
Then he got up from his knees and looked across the room at the little boy, who had moved behind the table. John had taken up his position for a fight. He wasn’t hiding, his father noted.
Promising. He was going to make a good man out of John.
Would he respond to a command? Chasing him would turn into a game; there would be confusion and he didn’t want that. No laughing and giggling his way to forgiveness: the boy needed discipline.
The small mouth pursed, ‘No, Daddy.’ But there was a look of alarm.
Again. ‘John, come over here to me, please.’
Clinging to a chair, then a table leg, the small figure moved round towards him, then stopped. He began to play with a set of tassels, before glancing quickly back up at the familiar face, exploring. Nurse had taken Elsie away, ostensibly to bathe her head but evidently not eager for either of them to witness the scene which was in the making.
Rud wavered: the kid was pretty small. But he couldn’t have Carrie upset every day like that. It was hard enough for her to keep in spirits without that.
‘You’ve made Mummy very sad by behaving so badly,’ he spoke, reaching out to take the unresisting hand where it dangled. ‘It’s no good you know, Johnny, I can’t let you grow up to be a bad boy. You’re going to have to have a spanking.’
Johnny looked up in surprise and interest. That sounded hopeful. He had heard older children talking about spankings. Now he was big enough to have one of his own. When his father pulled a chair out from the table and sat down it seemed that a spanking might turn out to be a new kind of story. But in a moment he found himself staring at the carpet as he lay across his father’s knee: and his father was hitting him. It hurt.
He was set back on his feet.
‘Why, Daddy?’ he demanded. ‘Hitting is very horrible and naughty.’
* * *
Over in Tisbury, by the year’s end, there were grounds for hoping that this time Trix was not going to relapse.
‘What an ear you have, Trix,’ Alice regarded her daughter with fresh wonder. ‘Do go on.’
They were upstairs in Alice’s tiny sitting room. Trix was reading aloud from a piece she had just started, a monologue spoken by a wife out golfing with her husband. ‘I’m thinking of calling it On the Ladies’ Links,’ she explained. She appeared to be enjoying herself enormously.
‘Wasn’t that a good drive of mine? I’ll pace it. It was quite twelve yards! Oh bother! My ball has stuck in a horrid little hole. George, George, come here and tell me. Ought I to play with a cleek or a niblick? There! Now it’s gone into the road. Tell that bullock man to stop. I don’t like walking into all that dust. Will it count against me if I send the caddy to bring it back? What a shame!Fancy, I’m eight for this hole, how dreadful! Three for you again? Well you are lucky.’
‘It’s quite wicked but terribly clever, my dear,’ her mother applauded. Trix was looking more relaxed that she’d seen her for years.
‘I’m having such fun writing this. It was Maud’s idea that I might try going back, doing a piece set in India. She’s only waiting for her little boy to go to school, she said. Then we can write together seriously.’
Alice didn’t respond immediately. She didn’t warm to the direction Maud’s sympathies were taking. She had been a faithful correspondent all through but her feeling for native life had quite warped her judgment.
Alice, shifted uneasily in her chair.
Why, in one passage that Trix read aloud, Maud had spoken of the ancient ordered law of Indian life contrasting it unfavourably with the English gospel of progress at all cost.
As for claiming that English women in India lived in a state of continual causeless irritation and suspicion that degraded them, Alice could not imagine what Maud meant. Alice was perfectly certain that repeating such stuff at the dinner tables of Calcutta, once Trix was well enough to return to them, would not be to her advantage.
Despite her qualms, Alice compelled herself to remain smiling.
If Trix could write like this about a trying wife and the silent suffering of a husband, did that mean she was getting over that dreadful animosity towards Jack?
She settled her shawl more comfortably. Meaning only to encourage, she suggested, ‘Have you thought of showing this to Ruddy, next time he comes over to visit?’
It was not a good move. The look of pleasure left her daughter’s face.
‘Ruddy? You don’t hear a word about India from him these days. All forgotten. And this new plan, living out there at the Cape half the year. Who does he think he is, Mr. Secretary for the Colonies?’
Trix put down her notebook and crossed her arms.
This anger, the fierce expression, were surely excessive. They might tip into one of the full blown scenes Alice hoped never to be exposed to again. Dreading to see her daughter’s hands move up towards her hair, she intervened, swift, non-committal.
‘Goodness knows. I suppose the climate’s an attraction.’
It might have been too late. But instead, with a pounding heart, Alice saw Trix turn back to her notebook, pencil in hand.
‘I do hope we can have a session with our poems, later on. I’ve got some more ideas for them. Writing together, your poem a response to one of mine, it’s fun.’
* * *
For a second year Rud carried his family off to spend the English winter in South Africa. Fighting was still in progress, though far away. They were now settled in The Woolsack. Behind it reared the black triangle of Devil’s Peak. You couldn’t escape it, oppressive as old sorrows. Carrie tried to avoid looking back up the slope of the mountain when she was outside. Instead she gazed ahead along the paths or out over the great broad plain towards the sea.
Hearing Rud call from the garden, as she sat reading in the drawing room after dinner, Carrie put down her book. She passed quickly through the atrium and faced out into the warm darkness. Holding back her skirts she crossed over the terrace, carefully picking her way down the brick steps.
She was blinded, leaving the light.
Looking up at her uncertain figure from where he stood deep in shadow, Rud was unexpectedly moved. She was coming to find him. He was glad he’d called. Not sorry he’d given up the secret ownership of the night garden. He stepped forward, towards the halo of light streaming from the opened half-door, reached out and took her hand.
‘My dear, I wanted you to see these stars.’ Her face, which had been turned his way, lifted towards the sky.
They were strolling now, steered by the breaths of sweetness from the frangipani flowers, their radiance ghostly at that hour. He tucked her hand under his arm; she moved closer but almost by accident he moved further apart at a turn in the path. They quietly retraced a regular route back and forth.
Rud spoke fretfully into the silence. ‘I wish I felt that I was really doing some good here.’
Dropping his arm, Carrie paused. She appeared struggling to read his face.
‘Was I wrong? I thought life in Cape Town was really suiting you. It’s got you writing again, you said you’d collected a heap of notions to work up here. The Army of a Dream is just the start. And even though Lord Milner’s not here, you’re always so busy, between the hospitals and Simonstown and Groote Schuur.’
‘Well, there’s no Groote Schuur at the moment and not likely to be any more this trip.’ He couldn’t keep the sadness out of his voice. ‘Rhodes left two days ago. Who knows when I’ll – we’ll see him again.’
Carrie knew it wouldn’t do to reveal how that news lifted her spirits. She tried to hide her growing resentment of Mr. Rhodes, the place he had come to take in their lives. It was complicated. When Rhodes first asked her to foster a young lion-cub from his private zoo, she’d relished the challenge, the adventure of it, the romance. She’d given Sullivan his bottle with her own hands – once she’d ransacked the Rondebosch shops for leather gauntlets. The children doted on him.
But she wasn’t sure that Sullivan was really safe with children, these days. He’d grown into a daunting creature with an indolent, lordly gaze.
‘Look, Sullivan can see right down through the length of Africa, just like Rhodes,’ Rud would claim, leaving Carrie wincing.
Cautiously she returned to the present conversation and to Mr. Rhodes’ departure.
‘Do you know what his movements are, his plans?’
She felt Rud relax.
‘I think I know more about them than most, I can say with some confidence, but of course they’re liable to sudden change. He has the most extraordinary ability to adapt, to see ahead to consequences and adapt to the unexpected change in circumstance.’
She was murmuring agreement, wondering silently whether this would mean that Rud would spend more time with them, perhaps plan some outings for them all. The children were old enough to enjoy being taken out, being given the full attention of their parents. Or would this be – she stole a panicky glance across at her husband – the signal for a bout of paralysing gloom?
Rud was still speaking. ‘You know, I sometimes feel it’s Destiny itself that I’m meeting face-to-face in Rhodes.’
He didn’t notice the way her arm and her whole body stiffened. She could not like the turn Rud seemed to be taking. This almost mystical language – her New England soul rose in revolt.
‘There is something in the universe that is deeper than mere brute struggle. A higher order that is emerging, a spiritual order too, that we can only glimpse at certain times. In him I’ve felt I was seeing it blazing forth. One doesn’t know why one should be so privileged…’
She couldn’t let this pass.
‘Rud, darling, if any man alive has earned a place in the councils of the powerful – I mean, the wise – it’s you. Tell me one man whose work means more to his readers?’ As an afterthought, ‘And did you see the note from Effendi about the new edition? It was in this week’s mail.’
‘Effendi? No, I hadn’t.’ Ever since Frank N. Doubleday had proved himself such a friend in need, the very mention of his name, especially the pet name based on his initials, warmed Rud. Her distraction had worked for the moment.
But she wasn’t easy in her own mind. They’d accepted so much from Mr. Rhodes. She herself was almost seduced when he paid her the compliment of acting on her advice. Usually he set little store by women.
He’d been speaking of encouraging young men to travel for their education. At first she’d listened without a word as he and Rud laid out their plans.
‘Scholarships are what’s needed. Bring the most able men from the colonies to the Mother Country and give them a chance to develop their minds in the company of the best.’ That was Rud.
‘English speakers, of course,’ he emphasised, while Rhodes nodded vigorous agreement.
‘Bring them to Oxford; give them a year or two.’ Rhodes, who had studied there, was spellbound by the place.
At the name of the university a shadow’d seemed to pass over Rud’s face: was he recalling how he used to envy his cousin Stan, up at Oxford, while he himself was toiling through the Hot Weather of Lahore?
She’d imagined uneasily that they had no notion of including coloured races. Only when it came to the financial arrangements, though, had she spoken out.
‘Two hundred and fifty pounds won’t be sufficient to cover their expenses for a year. You’ve forgotten. The terms may be eight weeks long but they have to live over the vacations.’
‘Mrs. Kipling, I congratulate you. You’ve a better head on your shoulders than your husband and myself put together.’
Rud’s naïve delight had been painfully transparent. Her own feelings had been more divided.
Rud was already guiding her up towards the house again. He gestured up at Devil’s Peak in its looming darkness.
‘That black shape used to plague me, you know. Coming between me and the sky. But now we’re getting better news of Trix, somehow the threat of it has disappeared.’
She wished she didn’t have to be reminded. Of course she was relieved Trix was mending but she was weary of her ghostly presence in their lives.
As they reached the steps where light fell on the heavy pots of geraniums, she paused to tidy away a broken stem. Rising with the scarlet flowers between her fingers, she called her husband back. Making for his study across the atrium, Rud turned, eyebrows raised, then his concentration gave way to a smile as he took a spray of scarlet from her hand.
‘I think I’ll just drop a line to Rhodes,’ with these words he turned away, the door closing behind him. Biting her lip, Carrie looked round a little wildly, then rang for her maid. In a moment she thought better of it and sent the girl away, then sat down alone before the looking-glass, reaching up to take the pins out of the crown of her white hair.
‘It has been terribly lonely since you left. Rather like living in a landscape with half the horizon knocked out,’ her husband was writing to Cecil Rhodes. PS. We have been walking round the garden in the starlight and saying things about you that would be absurd in print.’
*
Sylvia Thompson, brought out as governess to John and Elsie, had gone up to her room straight from the dinner table. If she didn’t, she knew she would feel Mrs. Kipling’s eyes on her. Just to place herself beyond any possible criticism, for heaven knew the woman seemed to have inexhaustible powers in that line, she ostentatiously went out of her way to look in at the nursery, at the other end of the house, where Elsie and John lay sleeping.
The door was latched ajar, as all the downstairs bedrooms could be, to catch the cool night air. She slipped the brass hook out of its catch and stepped inside. At night, in the darkness, her own poor vision ceased to trouble her. She was on a footing with everyone else. The sound of even breathing, broken by little snorts from John, who really needed his adenoids seeing to, and the stirring of the light curtain in the night breeze calmed her further.
Every evening she found herself going to bed in a rage. She would have the privilege, Mrs. Kipling had grandly told her, of dining with the parents, though during the day she was to take her meals with the children and Lucy, their nurse. But sitting at that table, her back to the dresser, placed, she knew miserably, so that Mrs. Kipling could invent the need for Sylvia to effect little transfers of objects back and forth from the table, she never for a moment lost awareness of her humble position.
Why, on evenings that the famous Mr. Rhodes was invited, she was sent to eat early supper with the children. Mr. Kipling had seemed surprised.
‘I rather thought it would be an opportunity for Sylvia to be introduced to Rhodes: it’s not a chance that every girl is going to get,’ but his wife’s mouth had settled into a line.
‘I don’t really think it necessary.’ No more had been said.
The happiest hours she had had since leaving London had been spent with Mr. Kipling, that morning when he took her sightseeing after their ship docked in Madeira. He was like one of her young uncles, sparkling with life, interested in everything, including her own response to what they saw. The little boys diving on the quayside, the sallow men sprawled on the verandah at Reid’s Hotel that he pointed out as they trotted past in the high sprung brougham, the blazing flower market, with the haunted faces of the flower sellers.
He laughed, delighted when she turned to him as they were returning towards the quayside: ‘It’s been the best morning I’ve ever, ever had.’
‘My dear girl, you’ve no idea what a pleasure it’s been to me. You’ve been wonderful company: it’s brought me back to life and reminded me of outings I once used to take with another girl, though she was a good bit younger than you.’
He ceased as the carriage came to a halt. Only later did she come to wonder about her predecessor. Surely she, Sylvia, could not be reminding him of Mrs. Kipling?
It was impossible to make out her behaviour. It had seemed so thoughtful, so generous on her part, to be concerned over this dreadful near-blindness. Mrs. Kipling had obtained and passed on the advice of the distinguished specialist Mr. Barnard. When he declared that Sylvia must try a hot climate, she had immediately followed that by an invitation. But what had sounded perfectly acceptable terms – Sylvia would take charge of the two little children – had quickly broken down in reality to prove, as Sylvia felt, sore with the experience, a series of snubs, humiliations and exclusions.
Was it that Mrs. Kipling didn’t like her receiving attention from men? Remembering the night of the dance Sylvia’s eyes stung with angry tears. She had been on her way to join the distant sounds of music when Mrs. Kipling stopped her in the corridor.
Eyeing the lace on Sylvia’s white dress, ‘I can’t think what you are planning, Sylvia. It would not be at all appropriate for you to dance. I do have to answer to your mother. I can’t possibly take the responsibility.’
Silent, less docile than shocked, Sylvia had turned on her heel and locked herself into her cabin. It was nonsense. She knew her mother wouldn’t have hesitated to let her go to the dance.
In her letters home from The Woolsack, she hung back from describing the quarters she had been allotted. She couldn’t bear to worry her mother, who would know, however lightly she passed it off, that there was a tacit insult, one repeated every day, in giving Sylvia that tiny hot room over the kitchen. She imagined that it was meant for a black houseboy. To reach it after dinner was in itself an ordeal, for she had to make her way through the kitchen, where the maids, Lottie and Rose, sat with their guests, a couple of British Tommies. She felt herself shrink every night before their bold gaze.
Meanwhile, down on the ground floor, at the same level as the Kiplings’ bedrooms, the spare room stood empty every night.
The evenings were so long, since she couldn’t read to amuse herself. She saw that Mr. Kipling had noticed this, in his thoughtful way, when he offered to read to her himself, joking that it was one of the joys of his life to make people listen to his stories. Those three nights of The Jungle Book had been as good as the theatre. But Mrs. Kipling had put a stop to that too.
Sylvia would be much older before she could bear to take out these memories and look at them again.
* * *
By July the family was back in Rottingdean, Rud charged for action. The war out in Africa was dragging on, an apparently unwinnable conflict, where British forces were constantly outflanked by the skill and courage of the Boers. For Georgie Burne-Jones, who thought going to war with the Boers in the first place was a disgrace, this made gratifying news. She knew that it meant something very different for her nephew. Rud was taking the setback to heart and brooding over it as though it were his own.
This afternoon he’d come over from The Elms after her rest, as usual. She saw immediately that he was armed with a sheaf of foolscap: he must be wanting her to provide an audience.
‘I’ve been working on this story I began in Cape Town and it’s got a bit stuck. You wouldn’t mind if I tried it out on you, Georgie? A live audience makes such a difference…’
Setting aside a mild foreboding, she smiled, ‘Of course, Ruddy dear. I’m listening, off you go.’
He straightened his spectacles and plunged in. Page after page of it and dead as a doornail. Not an atom of the life that made his best work so entrancing. Half an hour passed, according to the little clock on her worktable, though it felt longer, before he looked up.
Sitting opposite him over her sewing, Georgie struggled with herself. He was a dear, dear boy and his gifts were astonishing but no, she did not care for the direction his work appeared to be taking. Yet with those bright eyes seeking so trustingly for her approval, as they had since he was a little boy, how could she withhold it? There was no point in anything but honesty, however, when it came to matters of art. That’s what her life with poor Ned had taught her.
She trod delicately.
‘I’m not perfectly sure of myself when it comes to war writing, Ruddy dear.’
She winced to observe a cloud come over his face.
‘Of course, your dialogue, the voices in this Dream Army story of yours give me pleasure. But your argument, it’s so forceful, doesn’t it risk…’
She hesitated, not wanting to be more specific. The story spelled out Rud’s new plan for national defence, clothed in only the skimpiest disguise. She’d felt hectored.
He jumped in, ‘But that’s the whole point: the story’s there to get my argument across. You have to exaggerate or people won’t take any notice.’
Her sewing put aside, she pressed her palms together.
‘But don’t you have to keep them with you, your readers? Is a story the right way to persuade people that children should be trained up as soldiers?’
A matter of technique: surely that was a question he would be able to hear. She had always admired the way he would tear up and abandon work that was going wrong.
‘I’m longing for a cup of tea, would you ring, darling?’ She must break the silence somehow.
It was no good. She couldn’t pretend. That story embodied an extraordinary and repulsive notion. She wondered whether those years he spent in the power of that dreadful woman in Southsea had anything to do with it. Fending for himself. Always on his guard. But how could he fail to anticipate reactions like her own to this… pamphlet? You couldn’t really call it a story. Mixing children up with matters of national defence! Wanting to train them up as soldiers from the age of six!
But a dogged look was coming over him. He bent to collect the dropped sheets of his story from the floor.
She changed tack.
‘Perhaps I’m simply too much out of sympathy with this war, Rud. I just cannot see it as you do. To my mind, our action in attacking those Boer republics is a matter of shame. Other countries despise us. But we’ve agreed to differ on this, my dear, remember?’
She saw that he could not resist her gentleness.
Emboldened, Georgie went on. ‘But I do hope that we see eye to eye about Miss Hobhouse and the concentration camps.’
‘The unspeakable Hobhouse, with her poking and prying into matters she can’t begin to understand?’
‘Ruddy,’ she paused, ‘Ruddy, I don’t understand why you’re so angry. I thought Miss Hobhouse had undertaken a very necessary task. If we’re rounding up women and children into camps – their poor innocent black servants too, I hear – isn’t it right to ask whether they’re adequately cared for?’
‘Cared for!’ He was on his feet. ‘I don’t think you sense the temper of the country at all. But how could you?’ He controlled himself and returned to his seat. ‘I can tell you, Georgie, that there is outrage among ordinary working folk here in England at the notion that we are feeding and supporting these people while their men are off fighting against us.’
She was not intimidated. She had nursed the man before her through croup when he was a child.
‘I’m sorry, Rud, but I cannot see that that justifies cruelty. The rations aren’t sufficient for health. Conditions are desperately insanitary and mothers are losing their children.’
She fell silent, suddenly conscious.
‘Greatly exaggerated.’ His voice was staccato. ‘The army has everything in hand. It’s time this war was brought to a close. No doubt there’ll be absurd sums paid out then, once we’ve defeated them, to get their wretched farms and equipment up to scratch.’
He looked at his watch. ‘I really don’t think you should distress yourself about the camps. Take my word for it, Georgie.’
‘Do you think it will ever be forgiven, that we stood by and let their children die?’ Georgie too was standing, though her hip gave a painful twinge at the sudden movement. ‘It’s not like you, to be indifferent to suffering, specially not in children. Just because these are Boers and their men are ranged against us – ’
‘Degenerates, mouthing the Bible and not shirking any treachery. Isn’t that enough?’
She could taste his bitterness on her own tongue. This was as bad as the plan for an army of children. There was no arguing with him.
And now she’d forgotten to ask how Trix had seemed, still cooped up with her mother, when he last went over to visit them.