AND ONLY THE MASTER
SHALL PRAISE US,
AND ONLY THE MASTER
SHALL BLAME US

‘My dear Mrs. Kipling, consider the strains to which you have been subject over recent years. Nervous exhaustion is only to be expected. A fortnight of complete calm with no domestic worries, the care of a nurse and regular massage are what is required.’ Sir Charles Ogilvy, the leading specialist, shook his head sympathetically.

She slumped back against the unyielding chair. Permission. The shelves of books which lined the consulting room appeared to waver and swim. She reached for a handkerchief, and tried to pay attention as Sir Charles elaborated. The doctors had finally decided that her wretched spirits were not after all caused by inflammation of the womb, their initial diagnosis. Her increasing stoutness was no cause for concern.

All the while, ‘complete calm with no domestic worries’ echoed in her ears.

She was too relieved at being spared an operation to ask why two weeks of isolation and tedium would put her right. Accepting a cool manicured hand from Sir Charles, along with the name of a reputable nursing agency, she made her way out into Harley St.

But what about the family, how would they manage without her? Before her taxi reached Hyde Park en route to Victoria she saw her way. Rud had been planning to go on manoeuvres with the Fleet anyway. They could arrange for the children to spend a fortnight at Crowborough at the same time. She would remain at home in peace, cared for by a nurse.

A week into her rest cure and, as she’d known it would, duty broke in. The first telegram arrived before she’d got out of bed. Nurse Todworthy had conceded that Carrie should take her meals downstairs but solely on the condition that she didn’t set foot to the ground before ten.

‘Our aim,’ she kept reminding her patient, ‘must be rest, complete rest. We must take advantage of this opportunity, with the children and their nanny off on holiday and Mr. Kipling off on business – out of the way,’ she added roguishly.

Carrie finished the last of the toast on her breakfast tray. The tea in her cup had gone cold. She made a face as she pushed it away and was just wondering whether she’d like fish for dinner when her maid Ainsley arrived, bearing the orange envelope. Nurse Todworthy was radiating disapproval in the background. How tiresome, it must be Rud warning that he was going to be delayed. She’d known that would happen when he decided to fit in a visit to his parents: she clung onto all she could get of him, did Alice Kipling. Never would Carrie consent to call her ‘Mother’ – she knew too well what strength of will had been opposed to her from the first. Well, at least she had not given the order for the fish. Perhaps she’d just have cauliflower cheese on a tray.

Once she’d taken in the message, her lips pursed. She struggled out of bed too quickly and had to hold herself upright by the tall oak posts.

‘There’ll be a reply: don’t let the boy go back till it’s ready.’

With ‘an emergency in the family’ she faced down the disgruntled nurse.

She looked around her for a moment before finding the cream woollen dressing gown in its place draped over the ottoman: wrapping it tightly about her, she moved over to the little writing table and reread the telegram with its raw appeal ‘Situation desperate. Unable leave. Advise. All love.’ How to reply?

‘Unable leave’ was nothing new. However, this did sound like a real crisis. Something must have set Trix off again. What horrors were implied by the discreet ‘desperate’, she dreaded to think. It was only a month or two since they’d been told Trix appeared much improved. Rud had been expecting to see her this time. Looking forward to it, she could tell, though with a background of tension. Those fits of madness in Trix – she, at least, would speak plainly in the matter – distressed him beyond measure. He wouldn’t be able to put pen to paper for days after this visit.

A glance at her watch, told her that time was passing. But she couldn’t decide quickly. She called her maid and gave the word to let the telegraph boy go on his way. Jarvis, the gardener would have to take her reply to the Post Office.

There they all were together down in Tisbury, stewing, as only the Kiplings knew how. And so proud of the group they made, referring smugly to ‘the Family Square’, even now. Mrs. Kipling would see to it that not one of them could escape. But perhaps, this time, since Rud had actually asked for advice, instructions from basecamp – the image made her smile – her views might carry some weight. She’d only heard reports of these attacks, Trix’s screaming, the attempts to tear out her own hair. It was enough. Though Rud refused to look facts in the face where his own family was concerned, as a straightforward American woman, she was in no doubt. It was absurd to try to contain Trix within an ordinary household: nursing care in some kind but well-regulated establishment was indicated.

She was still weighing the form of words available to her when the second telegram arrived.

‘Pater acute bronchitis. Suggest join me.’

Grudgingly she registered that Trix might not be the whole problem.

This time, Carrie chose not to hurry. She had enough respect for her doctors to want the routine of her morning to be re-established: otherwise her heart would race intolerably. Bathed, fresh from having her hair put up, her grey jersey dress improved and lifted by a small sapphire pin at the shoulder, she appeased Nurse Todworthy by taking to the sofa with both telegrams.

Of course, it was out of the question that she should go to Tisbury. How could a writer so subtle in his imaginings be so obtuse among his family! He would never accept the fact that she and Mrs. Kipling paralysed any good there was in each other. It would only heighten the tension if Carrie joined the party.

‘Imperative obtain professional nursing,’ she wrote at last. ‘Suggest return lighten household.’

There, she could only hope that the voice of common sense would carry the day. She watched from the breakfast room window as the boy cycled off with her reply. The morning was gone.

‘We’re going to be late with our massage,’ an aggrieved voice intoned behind her.

She was not enjoying the break from the children as much as she’d expected. On an ordinary day they would have come clattering down the stairs from the nursery, pushing each other and arguing about names for the kitten Aunt Georgie had given them.

The sun was in her eyes. She moved away from the window.

Lunch with John and Elsie might have been a pleasant distraction. For once she could have enjoyed their spirits wholeheartedly, forgetting the clamour that so often set her teeth on edge.

John seemed to pride himself on making noise.

‘The little beast uses that knife and fork like percussion instruments,’ his father observed.

She fancied that she could have been happy confirming that no shadow of grown-up care hung over their faces: she wouldn’t even have raised an objection if John pushed away the bread-and-butter pudding and made off down the garden.

A glance at the newspaper and she let it fall, to sit idly waiting for the tray of coffee.

Before she obediently retired to lie down after lunch, still at the table, she was handed a third telegram. To her confusion, this made no reference to her father-in-law’s illness.

‘Eager take Willoughby Manor.’

She rapped the board in irritation. Tuts from Nurse.

Why Rud should choose this moment when she was supposed to be free of all demands to press her in this way was beyond her. Months earlier, when he’d first spoken of Willoughby Manor, she had been no more than mildly attracted by the idea of an old house with an Elizabethan wing and the ghost of one of King Arthur’s knights. But she could guess what they were saying to him in Tisbury. His mother would be only too pleased to have him living near Salisbury, within easy reach.

‘And what about the ghost?’

‘Now, Mrs. Kipling dear, you mustn’t upset yourself.’

She was mortified. She hadn’t meant to speak aloud. To her alarm, tears were rolling down her cheeks as she stuttered.

‘I don’t want any more ghosts, any more haunting. I can’t bear it as it is.’

The nurse moved to a chair at her side but wisely forbore to take her hand.

‘I’m sure no-one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to, my dear. And judging from my professional experience, let alone what the doctors advise, I can tell that you aren’t really yourself at the moment. This will all blow over, you’ll see. Now, I do want you to take a little rest and then later, if it’s sunny, how about sitting in the garden and having your cup of tea out there?’ Five o’clock and the sunlight brilliant against the tall trees, as Carrie sat on by the depleted tray. She did enjoy a good seed cake. Shaky as she’d been feeling, she almost giggled to observe Nurse Todworthy advancing from the house, another tell-tale envelope in her hand. ‘Excellent terms WM visiting tomorrow advise clinch.’

He was waiting, she knew, for her approval.

She could not, would not, sign away her life, put them all at the disposal of Mrs. Kipling and the madness that had been spiralling around Trix.

Her spine straightened.

But neither could she be happy again, not for weeks, not until the children were home again and Rud had come back to her.

Rud’s return a few days later was fraught. Still barely inside the house, he pushed Carrie’s ready commiserations away.

‘Not at all. You’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick. I hardly saw her. The whole problem was the Mater. She just went to pieces with the Pater so ill. You could hardly expect me to leave, with her in that state?’

She recoiled, though he hadn’t meant to be savage.

‘Went to pieces? I find that hard to credit. Really, Rud, don’t you find that excessive? It’s just the usual pattern. Your mother can never bear to let you go.’

‘I imagine she’s simply exhausted herself over Trix,’ he snubbed her. ‘And by the way, Trix seems well on the way to recovery. She was off with a friend in the next village. When she did look in, she was mercifully calm, really almost her old self.’

He didn’t insist on Willoughby Manor, though he let her see his disappointment.

‘I thought you were all for it, Carrie. But if you’ve changed your mind, there’s an end of the whole business. I can tell when it makes sense for a wife to have her own way.’

‘Do try to understand. I haven’t just “changed my mind” like some silly fanciful girl. There are good reasons to avoid a place that’s haunted by the past. That’s not what I want for John and Elsie.’

‘Very well, whatever you say, my dear.’

Like any husband, he knew how to annoy a wife.

*

A few weeks later, an old friend arrived at The Gables. Ever since Maud Diver, who’d been back living in England for several years, had learned that Trix was well again, she’d been pressing Alice to let Trix pay them a visit. Now it was considered suitable, she’d come down from London specially to carry Trix home with her.

‘I was so relieved when your letters started up again,’ Maud confided, holding both her friend’s hands as they sat on Trix’s bed. ‘I knew something was terribly wrong when they stopped, we’ve kept it up so long, this correspondence. Ever since we were girls…’

‘It was your letters that kept me going when I was ill. You didn’t stop, you just –’

Trix made as if to write vigorously in the air.

‘Kept babbling on about Tom and about the baby,’ Maud finished for her. ‘Are you sure that all my stories of Cyril and his funny little ways didn’t upset you? I did wonder, afterwards, looking back,’ Maud searched her face.

‘Not a bit. They left me full of hope and interest in the world. Reminded me that there’s still time, you know.

Maud was looking doubtful.

‘But there is, Maud. You’ll be able to write seriously once Cyril’s gone away to school.’

‘Ah. I thought you meant – never mind. You’re quite right. I will get time to myself, but at what price? Losing Cyril for weeks and months at a time.’

Feeling Maud droop, Trix pressed her hand.

‘But we mustn’t linger. It’s time to be off, was that your bag in the hall?’

Maud was her brisk self again.

‘I was just a bit afraid your dragon-guardian Mama wouldn’t let you come, at the last moment,’ she giggled, as they stood together before the mirror to put on their hats.

*

Alice and Lockwood now had The Gables to themselves, for the first time in several years.

‘You’d never know that Trix ever had – difficulties’, Alice observed, turning to her husband after waving the pair off.

They couldn’t have hoped for better proof of her recovery: standing arm-in-arm with Maud, the happy wife and mother, Trix looked every bit as bright eyed, every bit as charming, in her new spring coat..

‘Perhaps there is still time. Trix isn’t really too old. Though she might not be able to stand the noise, they do make a racket –’ Alice was thinking aloud.

He stared at her, incredulous.

‘Hold on, Alice. You’re not imagining Trix with a child? You haven’t even spoken to her about going back, back to India to live with Fleming, have you?’

‘Not exactly. Not yet. Before today I wasn’t sufficiently confident –’

The clumsy front door, with its too-heavy fittings, groaned as he closed it behind him, before leading her into the drawing room.

‘The time has come for us to face this, my dear. Trix can’t stay here with us indefinitely. She isn’t a child. As a married woman her place is with her husband, out in Calcutta.’

‘It’s rather soon. I’m really not sure she’s fit enough,’ Alice’s words came fast.

Neither of them had paused to sit down. This air of tension was just what he’d wanted to avoid.

‘I know –’ he gave himself time to settle in his usual chair, ‘I’m quite as troubled as you are at the prospect. There’s no sign that life with Fleming has made either of them happy. But you know as well as I do what would happen if Trix stayed here.’

‘No-one could say anything,’ Alice argued. ‘She’s only just getting over a serious illness.’

‘That won’t wash for much longer. A woman who’s well enough to go about paying visits –’ he didn’t need to continue.

She was silent, picking at the fringe on a cushion. Then she spoke in a rush.

‘People are so cruel. Why should it matter to anyone outside her family where Trix lives?’

‘In the eyes of nearly everyone you know, Alice, a woman living apart from her husband, whether it’s Trix or anyone else, puts herself outside the pale.’

She murmured but he pressed on, pulling at his beard as he spoke.

‘We mustn’t deceive ourselves. It’s seen as a scandal. Isolation follows. Foolish and unjust, but that’s the case. At first there might be a trickle of visits, a few friends calling, but that’d soon die away.’

Alice bowed her head. In a muffled voice, ‘I can’t bear the thought. Trix left with no-one.’

‘Won’t you come and sit here, beside me, love?’ He stretched out a hand to draw her towards him. ‘We can’t let that happen.’ ‘Not again,’ a voice in him whispered. And there was another thing his wife needed to understand.

‘Don’t imagine that we wouldn’t be affected. It’s starting already. Eyebrows were raised when you let it be known that Trix was off to stay with Maud. You told me so yourself.’

For once, she appeared defeated. Her eyes closed.

‘I’m so tired, Jack. I don’t think I can go through –’

‘It’s not impossible for them to make a go of it, you know. Rub along, the same as dozens of couples. Not everyone can be as happy as we have been,’ he leaned across and took her hand, to kiss it.

‘Trix hasn’t said anything to suggest that Fleming’s a monster. I could never make out what was behind her refusal to hear his name.’

‘A temporary hysteria, perhaps? She does seem perfectly calm again now.’ Alice sounded more hopeful.

‘He’s a dull enough stick but he doesn’t run after other women or beat her.’

He ignored the sharp breath she drew at his plain speech.

‘I really don’t see why they shouldn’t make a go of it. And in the end, what’s the alternative?’

Alice looked down at her hands, twisting them together.

‘There isn’t one,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘I know you’re right. I just hope we can find the right moment to say something.’

At the end of her week’s visit, Trix returned. As she ran upstairs to tidy her hair, ‘Let’s take our tea outside,’ Lockwood called after her. ‘We’ve waited it for you.’

She threw back over her shoulder ‘We worked on our stories every morning, just for an hour, till little Teddy was ready for us to play with and again during his nap in the afternoons. Maud says that when he goes to school she’s going to write all day.’

Alice and Lockwood waited, silent in the late afternoon sun. As Trix appeared, Alice stopped fiddling with the sugar tongs, to pick up the tea strainer and direct her attention to pouring.

Lockwood waited till they each had a cup in their hands.

‘Trix, darling, have you started to give any thought to going back?’ He hoped his tone was light.

‘Back, father? Back to Maud’s? Are you teasing?’ Trix’s smile didn’t falter.

He stirred his tea.

‘Back to India, I mean.’

From under lowered lids Alice fixed her eyes on Trix. Lockwood kept his own gaze turned away.

The silence filled with the cooing of wood pigeons.

‘Oh.’ Trix laid her cup back down in its saucer. ‘No. I hadn’t begun –’ she broke off.

Her voice steadied and she went on.

‘Silly of me, I suppose. I’ve just been happy to be well again. And with ideas for poems and stories. I hadn’t really thought –’

She’d lost some of her colour.

‘You know how much I miss you when you’re away,’ Alice interrupted, her voice breaking unexpectedly. ‘But what life can you have, darling, a woman separated from her husband, without the excuse – the justification – of illness? No-one would agree to know you. Where would you turn for a friend?’

‘Perhaps the oldest and dearest ones, like Maud, might stand by you. But otherwise you’d be alone. Your life would wither away,’ he warned. There were tears in his eyes.

Trix was cutting her bread and butter into diamond shapes.

‘How do you know that? Not everyone is as narrow minded as your friends down here – I mean the county people. I could go to London, stay with –’

Alice didn’t allow her to continue.

‘It’s out of the question. What would you use for money? Your father and I haven’t the means and you can hardly expect your husband to finance you.’

Coaxing, he asked ‘Do you really intend to condemn two people, yourself and Fleming, to such loneliness, Trix? Would that really be for the best?’

His choice of words had its impact. Now Trix seemed about to cry.

‘I don’t want anyone to be lonely,’ her voice shook. ‘It’s a shock. I should have seen this for myself. I can’t think why I didn’t. But give me a little time to get used to the idea. Of being a wife again, I mean. I think I can do it, if I have to.’

Later, when Trix was fastening Alice’s necklace for her, before dinner, and they were alone, Alice ventured, ‘If Jack does insist on your marital duties,’ – she spoke carefully – ‘it’s always possible to pretend that it’s not happening you know, dearest. Just put your mind somewhere else.’

Trix nodded thoughtfully masking the outrage that swelled and threatened to choke her. ‘Put her mind somewhere else?’ Didn’t her mother understand by now that a mind that went off somewhere else was a terrifying liability? Anything to avoid losing herself like that again, anything.

The first thing was to stay calm, though. Nothing strident.

Looking her mother up and down in her evening dress ‘I’m not sure that fabric is really your colour, have you thought of dyeing it? she advised, sweetly.

*

Weeks after their return, John and Elsie were still consulting the ragged strip of seaweed they’d brought back from their holiday, Carrie was amused to observe. That time at the sea had done them good. November and no sign of a cold from either of them, she congratulated herself as she came downstairs. The alarms of the summer were behind her. Every morning Rud was shut away writing hard.

The garden hadn’t much in it at the moment but she’d have a look. A trug over her arm, she was on her way back inside with a few sprays of foliage for a vase when Perceval Landon arrived. Since Rud worked with him in Bloemfontein he’d become a family friend.

‘The children will be down in a trice, they know you’re coming,’ she warned him, as they settled down by the drawing room fire.

‘So Rud’s still pegging away at that plan of his for army reform?’ Perceval Landon spoke over John’s head. Arms braced about the tall man’s knees, he was attempting to push him over.

‘Steady, Johnny, steady there, you’ll have me crashing onto your mother on that sofa.’

Elsie had only just left off swinging from the elbow he’d crooked.

Carrie laughed. The children could be left to take out their affection on Mr. Landon without fear of rebuff.

‘Pegging away’s the word. He insists on making a short story of it but it’s a struggle.’

‘Surely not that same piece he’d already started on the way out to Cape Town last year?’

Landon’s surprise encouraged her to go further. ‘You’ve no idea how worked up and anxious he was about the soldiers, even before the war was properly started. And once things began to go wrong, as they did, he was in a perfect fury.’

‘Against?’

‘Against the government, the War Office, I suppose. That they sent men away to fight so ill-prepared. He took it so personally. He’s been obsessed by the need for defence, proper defence, ever since.’

Landon was impatient: ‘I don’t understand but then I’m only a newspaperman – that’s enough now, kids, I’m going to sit down. He seems to be taking a long time in laying out some quite straightforward propositions.’

The temptation of sharing an editorial discussion was too much. Besides, she didn’t understand Rud’s investment in this piece either. She mistrusted it, just as she winced at the gabble of information and plans for stories which broke from him when he was carried away by an audience.

‘He’s rewritten The Army of a Dream so many times I can recite parts by heart: ‘all boys begin physical drill to music in the Board Schools when they’re six; squad drill one hour a week when they’re eight; company drill when they’re ten –”’

Landon put up his hand, laughing. ‘Doesn’t sound much like a story to me.’

‘You put your finger on the problem. Rud’s worked out his plan for universal defence in the most elaborate detail. It might be a government report. But of course he wants to reach all those readers of his, so he pretends it’s a short story. You can imagine the work involved in trying to dramatise it.’

‘Can it really be worth it?’

‘We’re not supposed to ask. He’s nowhere near satisfied with it yet. But when Rud starts on matters of national defence, I’ve learned to keep my own counsel. That’s where he is now, of course, up at the Rifle Club he’s started. Rud’s determined that all the young men hereabouts will learn to shoot: he’s up there most evenings but today, in your honour, he’s restricted himself to an hour in the afternoon. I think I hear him now.’

With a roar of delight, her husband advanced, throwing his hat down, hand outstretched to greet his guest.

* * *

Once Trix had left for Calcutta, Lockwood gave in to temptation. These days Alice had no interest in travelling but he’d accepted the invitation to join Rud and Carrie out at the Cape.

Back from a morning in the Malay Quarter, he eased himself into a wicker chair overlooking the garden.

Laying her work down on the low table, Carrie asked, ‘Were you hoping for tea?’

‘In a while perhaps, my dear. But it was for the pleasure of sitting with you that I’ve come out.’

‘Poor girl,’ he noted how her eyes had filled at his words. ‘She’ll never admit it’s too much for her. Thank goodness I was able to come out to join them this year. At least while I’m here there is someone to pay her a little attention. Keep her company.’

‘You know, I believe I am ready in fact for my cup of tea,’ he said aloud. ‘Shall we ask them to bring it?’

They sat companionably, Carrie nibbling at the cinnamon biscuits while he admired the view down over the great broad plain towards the sea. Rud thought it asked to be planted with orchards. What made him such an expert, all of a sudden? He ought to take him up on that.

‘Tell me again, when’s Rud coming back?

Carrie didn’t smile.

‘D’you know, I’m not entirely sure. It seems to fidget him to fix anything, so I don’t press him. I only fear he’ll exhaust himself. Hour after hour in the hospitals with the wounded. Concerts for them. He recited a couple of his new war poems at a concert for five hundred of them a week or two before you got here.’

He didn’t reply, encouraging her to go on.

‘Of course, they all adore him, the men. I sometimes wonder if all this isn’t too much like a drug, the excitement of it all, what Rud calls the political side of his life. I was so glad when Henry James said it for me. He absolutely scolded Rud; I saw the letter. “Chuck public affairs, it’s an ignoble scene, base humbug,” those were his exact words.’

He considered. ‘And you, Carrie, you feel there’s something actually excessive in the way he’s throwing himself into affairs over here? I would have to say, my dear, that I agree with you. But I am also hopeful that it is only a stage, possibly a necessary stage, in his recovery from…’ He allowed his voice to die away. A field of force around Carrie barred direct reference to Jo’s death.

‘If there were only this running about – you’ll forgive me for speaking so plainly – this running about with famous men involved, I would be truly concerned. But you spoke of the hospitals: that’s something different. He’s always been good with sick people and children. As a rule young men don’t care for babies but Rud was crazy about them, even at eighteen. I suspect that it’s something of a lifeline for that side of him, working in the hospitals.’

Carrie nodded, reluctant recognition. She could probably have done with more of that at home.

‘I can’t say that winding bandages and packing kitbags, the sort of work that comes my way, makes me feel any better, but I suppose you may be right.’

Sensing they shared a train of thought, he went on: ‘It’s not just the physical illness, is it, that he’s got to get over?’

She drew herself in, speechless.

‘My dear girl, I’m so clumsy. Let me try again. He blames himself, I believe, can’t help blaming himself.’ He didn’t need to be more explicit. ‘I’ve come to believe that while Rud’s doing his best for these sick men, he’s fighting to recover his self-respect.’

‘To make amends?’ she asked in a voice of bitterness.

For the wrong choice that she herself had made? Would Rud ever forgive her? Lockwood couldn’t escape her meaning.

‘Perhaps. That might not be the best way to put it but it will answer.’

‘It is different from dining at Groote Schuur, I can see that,’ she answered slowly. ‘And anyway, those particular days are over. Sir Alfred’s moved his headquarters out of Cape Town and Rud doesn’t want to accept it, but Mr. Rhodes’ heart is finally giving out. I’ll think over what you’ve said. And I won’t stand in Rud’s way, whatever it costs.’

She remained silent for a while, then turning to him, ‘I often say that I could never advise a girl to marry any literary man. They so live off their nerves. When they’re not writing all they need is for you and everything else to be dead calm.’

He faltered, reaching for some more positive note.

‘You and I can do nothing but stand by and let him fight this battle. At least it’s taking place over ground that he’s chosen.’

*

Cecil Rhodes had gone down to a shack above the beach to die. Trudging down from the ugly brick-built station at Muizenberg, Rud came to a halt in the narrow shade of an overhanging bougainvillea and removed his straw hat to wipe his forehead. Hanging leaves left their debris caught in his hair. Irritated, he brushed the dry traces away and felt a tiny fragment slip down inside his collar. March, a heatwave and as yet no sign of the cooler weather.

He looked out over the bay. Glass-green curled over sheets of turquoise, the heavy rhythmic crash echoing inside him. Was it for this, the sense of weight and power, that Rhodes had insisted on being nursed here?

The lanky figure of Jourdan, Rhodes’ secretary, was standing out on the rickety stoep. Dapper as ever, though his face was shockingly pale, he cut an odd figure in the shabby cottage.

His voice was low as he explained, ‘Not a good night. His breathing is very difficult. He gets… agitated.’

Rud had never really cared for the man but his heart softened at such evident distress.

‘I’ll only stay a few minutes.’

‘It’s quite important, the doctor says, not to let him talk; he tires so easily.’

With some irritation – what did the fellow think he was going to do, suggest a debate? – Rud nodded assent. Ushered inside, he was struck again by the violent contrast with Groote Schuur. At the thought of the big house there had been such pride in designing, the site of so many splendid dreams, Rud shook his head. Now all that Rhodes could hope and fight for was a mouthful of air.

Once in the room with Rhodes, though, he meant to make the best of it.

‘Rather larks, your little camp, just by the beach.’

The jovial premeditated words were scarcely out before memory silenced him. Many photographs of Rhodes on camp were displayed in Groote Schuur, images of Rhodes seated, his black servants at his back, before a tent pitched at the side of a wagon.

‘That’s when he’s happiest, you know. Away from home, away from his own people,’ Carrie’d whispered.

They’d asked about the other photographs of the stern-faced mother, the vicar’s wife, the cluster of brothers.

‘I was her favourite,’ Rhodes had admitted, with something like embarrassment.

Rud saw no photographs here by the invalid’s bed.

The stranded hulk slowly turned its head.

‘Rud, is that you?’

‘Don’t try to talk, old man, they don’t want you to talk.’

‘They never did, she would never let me – ’

‘Hush.’

Was he wandering? Viewing that degraded body, it was clear that the end couldn’t be far off. The once baggy skin around the eyes was now puffed out, the eyes themselves hardly more than slits.

Panic swept through him a sense of sliding, a tilt in the world. He reached out and grasped the sick man’s hand, convulsively, feeling a sob rising in his throat. It might be their last meeting. He would never see Rhodes again. But the hand he took was restless within his own. The sick man fretted and withdrew from his touch. Abashed, he cursed himself and his cheap, sprawling emotions.

‘Is there anything that we can have sent to you?’ he heard himself say.

The air of the sickroom was making him nauseous. Guiltily, he reached for his hat.

‘Jourdan’s promised to keep us informed. They do say that a storm’s coming tonight and after that it should be a little cooler.’

He couldn’t tell whether Rhodes was listening.

‘She never wanted me to think and if I did she never wanted me to speak,’ came the voice from the bed.

He’d have to go. There was nothing he could do.

Wait. They obviously couldn’t get round it to turn Rhodes. They’d need to do that, he’d lent a hand himself in the hospitals, more than once. No space and it would take several people, his frame was vast. Yet there was a way to cool him and make him more comfortable.

Rud beckoned Jourdan down the path.

‘Couldn’t a couple of workmen be got to cut a hole in the roof?’

That way they could lower a block of ice into the back room where the gasping bulk lay stretched.

Jourdan stepped back, his nostrils quivering at the intrusion.

‘But Mr. Kipling, the noise?’

‘Muffle their boots with rags. That’ll deal with most of it. Cutting a hole in this tin roof won’t take five minutes: it’s rotten with rust.’

Reluctantly, Jourdan agreed to look into it. The visitor clearly had no idea that he’d been a disappointment. Mr. Rhodes had often complained, ‘He’s written almost nothing about South Africa. After all I’ve done for Kipling, I did think he’d be more use.’

At the station Rud sank gratefully onto an empty bench. He was struggling against a rising anxiety. Though there were plenty of seats, when the train came he found it easier to stand, appearing to stare out at the suburbs as they bumped past. The effort of climbing the path up towards The Woolsack was welcome: he wanted it to go on, not to stop. He would climb up farther. Seeing the flash of Nurse Lucy’s uniform among the garden trees, he approached. The children were making themselves a house. They had chosen a wide stretch of shade and were arranging Elsie’s dolls in a circle around a small stool.

‘Look, Daddy, it’s a party!’ John ran up to him.

‘A party for dolls, old man? There might be more exciting games for you to play. Why not a game of soldiers? After all you are four’.

John’s face fell. He looked at the miniature cup he’d been holding and threw it down.

‘Good afternoon Nurse, I’m off on a bit of a walk. I’ll take Elsie; it will do her good. Come on, child, let’s race as fast as we can.’

Elsie looked up at her father, considering. At six, she was learning to take thought before she spoke. She set down the leaf plate she was carrying and got to her feet. Time on her own with Daddy, especially now when she could tell something was wrong. Daddy was sad.

*

‘You’re not joining us on the funeral train?’ There was astonishment in Milner’s voice.

For once Rud could be grateful for the prohibitions of doctors.

‘They think it might be too much for me,’ he offered discreetly, defying further question.

He’d escaped the interminable procession by rail out to the Matoppos hills where Rhodes had elected to be buried. They would have to pause at every blockhouse to accept a round of respectful fire. Marching down Adderley Street in Cape Town, as the body was conveyed from its lying in state was enough. He was relieved to have made his decision.

‘If I go, they’ll expect me to read my poem on his death, at the graveside,’ he explained to a baffled Carrie.

‘But it’s so fine, so dignified. You’re not afraid of breaking down?’

‘There is that. But you know, I’m not sure I want to go so far in that direction. As it were. Those “great spaces washed with sun” I wrote about, they feel too exposed. I thought I’d stay here with you and the children.’

‘You are a mystery,’ she exclaimed, almost provoked. ‘But you’ve made me happy.’

* * *

Only a matter of weeks after Rud and Carrie’s return from Africa, Home Leave brought Jack Fleming to London and with him Trix.

Rud and Trix were reunited in Tisbury.

‘I can’t tell you what it means, Trix – that you’re back to your old self once more –’ Rud broke off, laughing shakily. ‘Tell me again how the poetry got started.’

They were sitting, together with their mother, in the little breakfast room of their parents’ home. All round them stood the memorials of another life, from the peacock screen, now a little battered, to the heavy pieces of embroidery that hung on the walls. Lockwood, off in his studio, was giving some little girls their weekly drawing lesson.

‘Mama began it. Don’t frown, Ruddy. It’s no more than the truth. She suggested she and I should begin writing together. A little every day. And in the end, we found we had a whole bookful of poems.’

Rud’s smile was touched with constraint. He was not sure he could display enthusiasm for the anaemic verse coming out under the title of Hand in Hand, Poems by a Mother and Daughter. But the project had served its purpose. Trix moved on to writing and publishing something a good deal more sinewy, a set of parodies, and, what was more, under her own name, the one she was legally entitled to, ‘Alice Fleming’. Best of all, she really seemed herself again.

Alice spoke from the wooden embrace of the old Windsor chair, which she claimed was the only place she could sit in comfort.

‘Your father really didn’t approve at the time, but you see I was right all along. I decided it was the writing that stood at the core of the problem and I must get her going again. Poor Trixie, when she was … not herself, she kept getting so worked up about publishers, she would insist that she was…’

She stopped, picking up their rigid silence.

‘Well, it’s not “poor Trixie” is it any more? It’s big fierce “Alice Fleming” of the Pall Mall Magazine, scourge of feeble-witted poets, including her hapless brother,’ Rud said firmly.

Trix looked uncertain. ‘I did wonder whether you’d mind my jokes about your verse from the war. But I thought it must be all right when Father decided to ask Mr. Cornford to place my comic odes as a set.’

Trix hadn’t seen her father’s covering letter. Fratricidal was the word he used, when he sent the poems off to Leslie Cope Cornford, their family friend.

‘Don’t sell yourself short, Trix,’ Rud objected. ‘They’re parody and first class. You’ve faked up just the sort of drivel people will produce in honour of the Coronation.’

He must be generous with his encouragement. But it had given him a turn to see her publish – publish! – those mocking lines.

He reached across and took the thick May issue of the Pall Mall Magazine from his mother. It wasn’t clear whether Alice was stroking the smooth cover or pressing it closed.

In his hands the magazine fell open at the page.

‘The cream of it is the way you’ve brought off the voices. They’re absolutely distinct. Alfred Austin and his droning pastoral –’ he took up the Magazine and read, spluttering:

‘Ah, stay, I have not mentioned roses yet

Nor verdant meads dappled with lowing herds,

I should not be Myself could I forget

The dicky-birds’.

He waved the journal about in his glee, then had to find the place again before he could go on.

‘And what about Willie Yeats – timid, dreamy sort, a great hulk of a chap, living in the past – you show him no mercy in The Pavement Stand of Westminstree. His Lake Isle of Innisfree will never be the same:

‘I will arise and go now, and go to Westminstree

And a small campstool take there, that’s very strongly made;

My gold watch will I doff me for fear of pickpocketry,

And meet with my fellows unafraid.’

Each catching the other’s eye, forgetting all that had passed, they stood together again, back in Lahore, back in his little curtained-off writing space in the house on the Mozung Road, sure of each other and laughing.

The following day, back in his own well-appointed study, Rud riffled through the heaps of unopened mail on a side table, till he came upon his own copy of the Pall Mall Magazine, still in its wrapper. He scrabbled, swearing, at the packaging. Beneath his pleasure in her accomplishment, he was discomfited by Trix and what she’d exposed.

Had that friend of hers, Maud Diver, had a part in this? She’d fancied herself as a writer. He’d never been happy that Trix was so thick with her.

He laid a heavy ruler flat on the opened page. Trix had gone straight for his war poems. Anyone could see that. He read over her opening:

‘Let the trumpets sound for the Day of Coronation.

(Listen all ye people in the lands beyond the sea.)

Ended now and over the Year of the Probation,

And the time has come appointed for the solemn Pageantry.’

It was horribly near the knuckle. Facile. And much too close for comfort to the opening verses of The King, the poem he sent The Times back in ’99 at the start of the war. He’d opened with trumpets – ‘Here is nothing new nor ought unproven say the Trumpets’ – and then brought them in again at the end of every stanza: ‘Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall!’ He recalled he’d been rather pleased with that at the time. Well, perhaps he had over-egged that pudding.

But all he was trying to do was warn the country against the Transvaalers, make them see that President Kruger and his sense of divine right meant danger and would destroy freedom. Now Trix was making fun of him about it and in the public press. People simply couldn’t mistake what she was getting at.

He had the impression that she’d been following every line he published then deftly, ruthlessly, reassembling them. He crossed to the bookcase to fetch the most recent scrapbook, where all his newspaper work was pasted up. What else had she targeted?

He peered again at the magazine:

‘Then till sword be beaten to ploughshare, and Mausers to motors weld, We will care for our own as we now care, and that which we hold shall be held.’

‘You have to hand it to her, she’s caught my voice,’ he said aloud.

‘Well, I hope she’s going to let it go again,’ his Aunt Georgie broke in. He’d been too absorbed to notice that she and Carrie had joined him in the study, taking the door left open in his haste as their invitation.

‘Listen to this.’ He had no time for pleasantries. ‘This is Trix, in the Pall Mall Magazine. A parody. It’s me to the life.

‘It behoves us to take good heed

Of the Work that is but beginning, of the Plougher who looks not back

Of the Strife and the Stress and the Sinning, and the train on the four-foot track..’

As he put the paper down, he was grinning in reluctant admiration.

‘She really has caught your … way with the Authorised Version,’ Georgie murmured. She held back from saying ‘trick’.

She remembered how Lockwood, who steadily refused to go to church, had challenged Ruddy on his use of Biblical language.

‘Some might call it cynical, Rud.’

‘It’s a universal key,’ the son had insisted. ‘Everyone in England – myself included – possibly barring Jews and the RCs – finds themselves opening up willy-nilly to the authority of that voice. We can’t help ourselves: it’s been drummed into every one of us as children.’

Like Lockwood, Georgie remained doubtful. Dear Ruddy, he did want to make people sit up and take notice. And he did take his responsibility as a sort of prophet so very seriously.

Now his cry of distress brought her back to the moment.

‘Till the Empire, in solemn seeming, frames the perfect entity,’ he read aloud.

‘Am I really that fatuous?’ he turned to them, wounded.

She saw that Carrie was flushed with indignation, too much put out at first to speak. Then, ‘How ungenerous, how sly,’ Carrie broke out.

The words were scarcely uttered before Georgie discreetly motioned her to silence. She looked across at Carrie for permission before beginning to speak.

‘That’s only a tease. Ruddy dear, it’s such good news that Trix is entirely well again and I must find time later to read her little piece. But now I want you to make me a promise. I know how busy you’ve been since you got home but I want you to take up your old habit of coming over and reading your new work to me in the afternoon.’

Taking his arm, even while appearing to lean on it, she walked him off to the drawing room, where long windows lay open to the twilit garden. She inhaled with pleasure.

‘I can tell that your mower’s been out today. Ours too.’

Before she left she would have a word with Carrie.

Once he’d seen Georgie home across the green, Rud went back to the open scrapbook. He was disturbed. Put together, presented as Trix had, his vision of the Empire lost some of its substance, its conviction for him.

For the first time, on turning over the scrapbook pages lined with columns of newsprint, his archive, he felt that what lay before him was failure. He was losing readers, unable to carry them with him. Though The Times had taken one essay on treachery among the inhabitants at the Cape, they had refused a second. And they’d not really backed him on the plan to train up boys as a future army of defence.

Carrie was calling him.

‘You’re not still brooding over Trix?’ she was yawning as she came into the room.

‘It’s just uncanny, the way she’s taken me up, word for word. Look here –’ he stabbed with a finger:

‘When service is never venal, for that shall be witchcraft’s sin

And the playing of games shall be penal, and each shall as soldier begin.’

‘Remember my essay The Sin of Witchcraft? I’ve got it here,’ he pointed at the scrapbook, ‘here, The Times, March ’01. And “the playing of games shall be penal”, that’s a crack at The Islanders in The Times this January.’

She gave a weary sigh. There’d been such a fuss in response to that poem: writing of flannelled fools at the wicket and muddied oafs at the goal’ had not been popular. If he wanted to get the landed classes to address their responsibilities and defend the country, as he claimed, he should have been more tactful.

‘Come to bed, Rud,’ she said, stroking the slight shoulders, as they bent over the papers on the desk. ‘You can’t expect to get people to share your feelings every time.’

‘They’re not feelings, they’re views,’ he snapped, jerking upright. ‘There’s a difference.’

He was always like this when he was trying to convert people to his ideas about this war. Obsessed by the need to guard against treachery, the need to prepare for future defence. She despaired.

‘Very well, Rud. They’re views. But they’re not ones I share and I’m going to bed.’

He couldn’t get anyone to listen. They were all turning away. As he sat looking blankly ahead in the darkened study, he felt the psalmist’s words rise up in him. ‘My soul cleaveth unto the dust.’ He made a struggle to laugh at himself but failed. The pang of rejection lingered.

‘I have chosen the way of truth’ – was that how it went on? So he had. He couldn’t pretend not to see what was right in front of him. He must speak out about politics: the fate of the world, let alone the Empire, was at stake. How were different peoples to live together in community with the least damage? How to contain the violence of greed? He could see now, at a distance, that was what Mowgli and the Jungle Law had always meant. But the fools – his readers, the world – had turned ‘the law of the jungle’ on its head so it meant rapine and slaughter. With a groan he repeated aloud ‘Take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth –’

He checked himself. Onwards, enough of these wretched regrets. There was some comfort. He noticed that Trix left his lyrics alone. There was no mocking echo of his Bridge-Guard in the Karoo. Tracking it down – ’01, if not earlier, in the scrapbook, he began to read it over, and was lost once more among the echoing spaces of the veld:

‘The twilight swallows the thicket,

The starlight reveals the ridge;

The whistle shrills to the picket –

We are changing guard on the bridge.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,

Where the empty metals shine –

No, not combatants – only

Details guarding the line.)’

Out in the war, there usually wasn’t much time for that brand of feeling. But Trix, like himself, could recognise loneliness and respect it.

He sat up straight.

Think of it: Trix recovered, back out in Calcutta, taking up her place in the world again. A new lease on her life. And meanwhile, that low grey Jacobean house near Burwash they had liked so much was now on the market. He must keep his name out of it or they’d be rooked, but by God he’d have that house.

* * *

That June the contract was signed and at the beginning of September they moved in to Bateman’s. This was the house for him, all right, more congenial even than they’d guessed. Every morning he woke in high spirits. A new start.

They’d been in less than a fortnight when the last invitation he wanted arrived through the mail. He was sorting papers on a rickety card table, in the room that was going to be his study. The long table he’d bought to write on stood downstairs in what was going to be the drawing room, waiting for the protective hessian to be removed.

Bringing a draught that fluttered every sheet, Carrie came in.

‘I’ve wired Curzon that it’s no-go. We’re not trekking out to Delhi for that Durbar of his,’ he announced.

‘Delhi? Durbar? Whatever do you mean?’ She stammered. ‘It’s no time since we moved here. I can’t contemplate outside distractions. Workmen are swarming everywhere and the plumbers have found a fresh difficulty with the W.C.’

‘I did tell you,’ he reminded her, with a sigh. ‘Curzon’s show out in Delhi, for the coronation. One hundred native rulers invited, thirty thousand troops to be inspected and he wants us out there as part of it. Part of the show. I’m blowed if we allow ourselves to be used to grace the triumph of George Nathaniel Curzon. It sounds to me as though it’s as much in honour of him as of the King.’

He made a grab to retrieve a letter that was too close to the edge of the table.

‘Is wiring him enough? Hadn’t you better write as well? I’d really come to discuss the estimate for the drains but you’d better finish dealing with that first.’

‘I’ve just done that. You’d better cast your eye over it,’ he held out the letter.

Putting down an armful of teacloths she reached for a chair.

‘I would give more than a little to be able to go to Delhi for the Durbar but as things are at present I must go down to the Cape this winter where instead of seeing India consolidated I shall have the felicity of watching South Africa being slowly but scientifically wrecked.’

‘I suppose that will do, it’s civil enough, but what do you mean, you must go. You make it sound as though you’re under an unpleasant obligation to visit the Cape.’

‘So I am. I don’t want to but I feel I must. As for India, it’s over for me, I tried to get Curzon to grasp that back in ’99, the first time he invited us. Why he should think I’d have any interest now in this New Delhi is beyond me.’

He tapped his fingers against the rough baize of the card table.

‘You really don’t care for India any more?’ she ventured, wistful.

‘My dear, it was the old days out there I used to long for. And they’ll never come back.’ It was a surprise to hear himself admit that.

‘I’ve never heard you say that before,’ she exclaimed, startled.

‘Somehow I can feel a different past in this place, one that’s also mine in a way. Or could be, if I chose to make it so,’ he finished.

‘You mean – stories?’

‘Ssh!’ laying a finger to his lips ‘not yet. But perhaps.’

Carrie hardly knew where her feet were taking her when she left the room. India firmly behind Rud at last. And she wasn’t entirely sorry to hear him speak of South Africa with frustration. How else was he going to give up his passion for The Woolsack and give his loyalty to a new home?

Passing a window, she paused to gaze out over the space of the garden and beyond to the wooded slopes.

Not quite right to call this house new, with its long history in the fold of the valley. It was exasperating to hear Rud exaggerate its age in reports to their friends. But if it meant so much to him to claim that their little mill went back to the Domesday Book, so be it. At least he’d stayed with recorded history, stopped short of the Garden of Eden.

As she made her way down the wide oak staircase – she still hadn’t quite got a feel for its risers – Carrie frowned to see a ladder propped carelessly against the fine old panelling. The house had kept its dignity through years when farmers made use of one or two rooms for eating and sleeping. No careless workman was going to disfigure it now. She made a note to remind the foreman about protecting the endpieces with wadding.

Considering there’d been no running water upstairs, let alone a bathroom, and no electricity in the house when they signed the contract a mere three months past, perhaps the frightful disorder was only to be expected.

The friendly chaos suited the children. Outside in the stable yard she could see John, armed with his own little pail of whitewash, ‘helping’, aproned to the eyes. From the landing came murmured voices, as the head housemaid counted the linen, while Elsie stood by, pencil and new notebook in hand, solemnly keeping the record.

‘Confound it, the place imposes its own tone,’ Rud complained. ‘It’s all very well buying a distinguished house but I never imagined it would set itself up as a silent critic of our taste’.

They looked sheepishly at each other and at the oak settle. Once they had it standing there in the hall at Bateman’s, it looked neither genuinely old nor worth what they’d paid.

‘D’you suppose they’d take it back?’ she agreed. ‘Never mind, that French walnut desk we bought for you fits perfectly.’

Her heart gave a thump. When she was listing items of furniture to be sent over from Naulakha, still standing deserted, she’d taken care to say nothing about any desk, battered or intact. All past ruin must be forgotten, left behind.

His high spirits on their trips together, out hunting furnishings, infected her. Opening her diary later, she found that he’d written ‘A honeymoonish time’, over the days they’d spent together.

‘How to feed them a magic that belongs to this place?’ Rud wondered aloud, as they sat together on the terrace after dinner.

Carrie raised her eyebrows encouragingly.

‘The world I grew up in, my first world, I mean had so much of it. Wayside magic, threshold spells. They made the world alive to me and this new/old house has brought it all back. I’m in the middle of a poem about it. They’re just pouring out of me, suddenly. Hang on, I think I can remember the bit –’ He closed his eyes and began to chant:

‘We shall go back by the boltless doors,

To the life unaltered our childhood knew –

To the naked feet on the cool, dark floors,

And the high-celled rooms that the Trade blows through:

To the trumpet-flowers and the moon beyond,

And the tree-toad’s chorus drowning all –

And the lisp of the split banana-frond

That talked us to sleep when we were small.

The wayside magic, the threshold spells –’

‘Rud! It’s magnificent.’ She was alight. ‘But it makes me want to cry, too. However can you give John and Elsie anything to match that, growing up in Sussex?’

He had to wait a year or so till they were old enough. First he told them the story at bedtime, now and then breaking into incantation:

‘Ye spotted snakes with double tongue

Thorny hedge hogs be not seen

Newts and blind worms do no wrong.’

They took the bait all right. He overheard them, chanting remembered lines when they were on their own, correcting each other.

‘John, no. It’s not “Wake when a violin is near”, it’s “Wake when some vile thing is near”. But it’s very good for your age.’

Rud snorted. Elsie had her own idea of kindness.

Once they were making it theirs, he was ready to make his proposal. He chose a moment when the three of them, out together in the fields for the afternoon, had thrown themselves down beside the big hayrick.

‘How would you like to act this out for yourselves? We could put on a show out here in the Quarry for Mummy.’

‘Bags I be Puck,’ John shrilled immediately.

His father chortled: ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t choose Titania, old man. That’s my part.’

‘Oh Daddy,’ John and Elsie shrieked in unison, throwing themselves as one on him as he sat propped against the tickling wall of hay.

‘And anyway, I’m the only girl, so it has to be me,’ reproved Elsie, resuming her eight-year-old dignity as she got to her feet.

‘Dadda, that only leaves Bottom for you.’ John was six. That name always reduced him to giggles.

‘We’ll start practising tomorrow,’ he promised, getting to his feet. ‘Time to get home now for tea.’

He walked round by the Mill towards home, while the children ran off to visit a new litter of puppies in one of the cottages he’d paid so much to make weatherproof.

‘It’s a curse inheriting tenants from an indifferent landlord,’ he complained as he took his cup of tea. Carrie’d rung once she heard his light step out on the terrace.

‘What we’ve taken on here, though we didn’t realise, is a huge project of restoration. Just as well that Naulakha and all the bother of it are going to be taken off our hands.’

She flinched but tried to keep her expression neutral. That chapter was better closed.

‘I’m glad it’s Molly Cabot buying it. I couldn’t bear our home to go to strangers.’

‘But what a loss! Five thousand dollars, including all remaining contents and to think we spent upwards of twenty-five thousand on it. Thirty thousand would’ve been more like a fair price.’

He drummed angrily on the arm of his chair.

Attempting to distract him, ‘It is a huge project we’ve taken on but it doesn’t seem to be making you unhappy.’

‘I do like the chance to bring order, to make the land flourish and bear.’

She gave a wry smile, remembering the squirrels who’d dug up her tulips.

‘But it’s yourself that you’ve finally planted, Rud, here in England, isn’t it? You and your poetry. That’s flourishing.’

The thought seemed new to him.

‘I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t thought of it like that.’ An interval, while he stared out over the swimming pond they’d had dug for the children.

Flicking the crumbs from her skirt, she was just thinking of the letters she’d write before dinner when he burst out.

‘If things had turned out differently in South Africa, if the party of government had been made of sane and honourable men, that would have been the place to try farming.’

That hobby horse again! Trying to distract him, ‘I do regret that wonderful climate. But there’d have been no Roman horse-bit for you to find out there when you sank a well,’ she teased.

He brightened immediately.

‘To see the land reveal its history, it’s astonishing. It feeds me. So many stories, I can’t get them all down.’

Back in his study the afternoon post had arrived and among the pile of letters a long narrow parcel. At once he set about slitting the brown paper, pausing to sniff with pleasure at the sealing wax. He was right: inside the stout cardboard box lay the old open-work iron bell-pull.

‘Come up and see,’ he called to Carrie. ‘By Jove, that fellow who bought Georgie’s London house off her is a decent chap. I did wonder whether it was an imposition, asking for the old bell-pull. But here it is, by return of post.’

‘So that’s it, just as you described,’ tracing the heavy loops of metal with a forefinger.

‘Feeling the shape of it against my hand was always the beginning of happiness. All I’d learned in that other place, the House of Desolation in Southsea, melted away.’

She slipped her arm through his and squeezed it in silence.

‘I’d like it if other children could feel hope like that, when they take hold of it by our own door. But before I forget,’ he moved the box from his desk to a smaller table nearby, ‘I’ve had an idea. Just one letter to write, then I thought you and I might take a stroll before dinner. It’s simply divine out there.’

He saw a way to deepen the magic. Gwynne from Bloemfontein days was coming down at the weekend, together with the Permanent Secretary of State for War. The kids were fond of Gwynne: he wouldn’t mind being asked a favour. Rud sat down:

‘Dear Old Man,

Now this is serious.

Can you when you come down with Ward on Saturday get for me from some London toyshop a donkey’s head mask, either in paper or cloth sufficiently large to go over a man’s head and also a pair of gauze fairy wings.’

* * *

‘You’ll be taking proper care of yourself this time, Trix,’ Jack said when she joined him once more in Calcutta.

‘No more of that nonsense,’ he repeated as she stood in the hallway the first morning, surveying her new home. 7/1 Loudon St. was the lower apartment in a handsome building on the corner with Theatre Rd. She could make it attractive.

But how to respond to him?

She knew she must live with Jack wherever his work took him. Girls didn’t realise what that meant.

Smoothing down her skirt, ‘Indeed, Jack, there’s nothing I value like my health and strength.’

Never again, if she could possibly help it, those dizzy plunges, that tearing rage. She shuddered.

Seeing he still looked uncertain, she added quickly, ‘Apart from yours, my dear. We must look out for each other.’

With a grunt, he left to collect his papers for work.

Not much but the best she could manage. She must settle to housekeeping and getting back in touch with friends.

Trix lay back in a long chair, too hot even to make an attempt at a poem. She hoped that no spirit messages would try to come through that day. When the messages from Myers started she’d taken care to hide it from Jack. She hadn’t courted them. True, she’d been reading his book, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. And reading it knowing he was already dead himself. Surely, though, she was only one among thousands of other readers. But William de Morgan, who recommended it, had been quite correct in predicting: ‘The book will mean more to you, Trix, than to most people.’

Still as she was keeping, drops of sweat were trickling down.

It had been the most extraordinary relief to read an account which so thoroughly explained her own experience, experience that others shrank from hearing. Mother had hushed her with a look when she tried to describe what she saw in the crystal before Josephine died.

She didn’t seem to have her eau de cologne at hand. Was it worth the effort of ringing for it?

Just reading the chapter headings, especially Sensory Automatism, Phantasms of the Dead, Motor Automatism had given her a sense she had at last come home. And all so closely argued, so based on experiment and observation. As she read on she’d made sense to herself as never before.

A blast of scorching wind rattled the windows. Outside scarlet petals from the gold mohur and the cassia would be flying like sparks.

She couldn’t have known, wasn’t responsible for what followed on reading Myers. The spirit messages, the insistence, the pressure.

‘You are to be a reporter for me,’ the trance-writing had instructed, claiming it came from the spirit of Myers himself. ‘Pass on my messages.’

A deep shiver ran through her at the memory of the headaches that announced them.

Hearing a servant pass, she called for a shawl, then stopped, confused.

In the end, though she’d been shrinking in fear of Jack finding out, she’d felt obliged to write to the secretary of the Society for Psychical Research. The relief, on opening her heart, on being able to ask for help: ‘it puzzles me a little that with no desire to consider myself exceptional, I do sometimes see, hear, feel or otherwise become conscious of beings and influences that are not patent to all.’

She’d covered page after page.

Flexing her fingers, she recalled how they’d ached by the time she finished.

The joy of finding the Society had a welcome for her! She hadn’t realised till then how homeless she’d been feeling. And now here she was, ‘one link in a chain of spirit connections’, as Miss Johnson, the kind secretary explained.

Perhaps after all she would try a little tea. But none of that disgusting boiled milk.

Of course, in her own case, the work all had to be done under an assumed name, ‘Mrs Holland’. The family were all so hostile. Now when the messages came, she sent them on to the Society in London. They said they sometimes found patterns but she’d no idea what that really meant. Miss Johnson called it ‘a set of cross-correspondences, a very remarkable experiment’.

That petticoat was clinging to her thighs so disagreeably. A cautious wriggle. Stickier than ever.

But these people were all so far away, she had no contact with them and the messages were so fragmentary. It was lonely work. At times she wondered about its value.

Abruptly, she clapped her hands together.

No brooding, she’d promised Father. Better to write to dear William de Morgan, he was always encouraging. Yes, a letter. Just put the heat aside and keep the page free of the marks of sweat.

‘Do you remember my automatic script? You and Evelyn are of the few I venture to talk to about it. It goes on fairly regularly, yet is dull when I read it over. But I send it – secretly – to the patient S.P.R. and they sometimes find things that seem to count. For instance – here in Calcutta on Oct, 17^th 1906 my hand wrote: –

“Nor guessed what flowers would deck a grave. Downing …

Do not let A. be seriously perturbed. This will be a slight attack and a very brief one. A.T.M.”

That doesn’t sound very evidential – but when one learns that on Oct. 17^th – Dr. A.W.V. of Cambridge went to see the Downing Professor – who was ill – finding this particular attack had been slight and brief, and that A.T.M. are the initials of a dead doctor of medicine, friend of them both – it gives one a little to think, doesn’t it? Also – on the death of the poor Downing Professor two months later – there were two “coincidences” in my script. Of course, I am not told of anything evidential until long and long after…’

She read her own words through doubtfully. It did all seem rather weak. But they’d assured her that her part in the work was invaluable. It was specially important, they said, that she was so remote, away in India: there could be no question of collusion.

Besides, what else could she do with herself and her messages?

That evening, sitting at dinner, she replied with scarcely a qualm when Jack asked her how she’d spent the day.

‘I was awfully lazy, I have to say. Reading mainly. Though I did compose a note to dear old William, thanking him for the copy of his last novel. It seemed a perfect disaster when the tile business went under but he’s turned out to be such a writer. You really should try it, Jack.’

Her husband snorted, ‘Let us hope he’s a better novelist than he was a businessman,’ before he put on his spectacles and spread out his papers to do some work on his project. The A.B.C. of the more important battles of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

*

Trix had come Home, for the English spring, on one of those regular trips ‘to keep your health up to scratch’, that Jack now encouraged. She was staying at Clouds, the great pile built by the Wyndhams, old friends of her parents. Accepting the invitation to join their house party meant leaving Alice and Lockwood, for her mother was becoming frail. As Lockwood put it he’d ‘no intention of leaving her alone to brood’.

Now Trix stood in her bedroom, before her looking glass, a moment after hearing the bell for dinner. She knew she was looking particularly well. The fashion for jewelled collars suited her.

‘Almost forty but you could pass for thirty, my dear,’ she told herself.

And this evening dress, her oyster silk, was wonderfully well cut. No-one would guess it was sewn by her little darzee in Calcutta. Such a narrow fit, though, over the hips. It wasn’t easy to walk in. Gathering up the heavy, sinuous folds in her left hand, she stepped cautiously over to the door, through a cloud of California poppy, her perfume, Eonia by Atkinson. Maud’s gift.

Pausing at the head of the broad staircase, she fingered the solid carving of the newel post. From the shadows to her left came a scuffle, suppressed giggles. The children, supposed to be out of the way, if not in bed, were gazing down like her at the grown-ups gathered before dinner.

She blew a kiss in the general direction of the muffled sounds. The sight of very young children brought back a familiar pain. No nursery of her own and never would be.

Downstairs, a man she didn’t know turned, looked up and caught sight of her. He bowed and raised his glass. Colouring with pleasure, Trix began to make her way down to join the party.

On her left, conversation between Madeline Wyndham and Sir Oliver Lodge was steady and animated. Her hostess had given the distinguished scientist the seat of honour on her right. Of course, they were old friends too – both of them members of the Souls.

How she longed to be part of a group of thinking people, like that. Distinguished politicians and intellectuals, meeting casually in society, linked by shared interests in new ideas, in politics and the arts.

She drew back to give the butler room to fill her glass. If she hadn’t married Jack, condemned herself to exile, would she have been taken seriously like Madeline and Violet Asquith? Been counted among the Souls? Trix shook herself out of it. Her smile mustn’t grow fixed. Since Madeline had chosen to seat her between Sir Oliver and George Wyndham, it would be foolish to feel despised and ignored.

She’d known George Wyndham more or less since they were both children. His sister had been at school with her cousin.

‘George?’ She began the work of the evening. And paused. What a handsome man he was now, with that straight nose and fine brow. ‘George, I know I’m rather behind the times – you’ve given up being secretary of state – but I’ve been so much wanting to hear from you about Ireland. Your Land Act. Are the tenants making a go of things, now they’ve got an acre or two to call their own?’

A delicate fragrance rose from the clear soup she’d chosen in preference over the heavier cream of lobster. The Wyndhams kept a good table. She picked up her spoon.

‘Trix, I might have known you’d ask. Never anything trivial,’ he teased. ‘I do have to say I’m pleased with how things are shaping over there. But I’ve got a much more urgent topic, a request and it’s rather selfish. Can I show you some Ronsard translations I’m working on? I feel certain you’d see how to iron out a few sticky bits. And I want to know what you’ve got coming out. Any more of those devastating parodies?’

Her shoulders relaxed: they made plans to meet after breakfast next day.

A maid leaned in and removed her plate. She had only toyed with the salmon.

‘I shall argue fiercely with you about Scott,’ was her parting shot as she turned gracefully towards the neighbour on her other side.

Sir Oliver Lodge, physicist. Fellow of the Royal Society. They’d been briefly introduced before dinner but it didn’t make her less nervous. She mustn’t seem too eager. It was such an opportunity to get him to talk about clairvoyancy. It wouldn’t do, though, to rush right in.

To gain time, she took up her glass, smiling charmingly over the rim, though she had no intention of taking more than the merest sip, the wine was much too dry. She couldn’t possibly discuss electromagnetism. But maybe she could ask about its relation to other forms of invisible energy.

It was as though he’d been waiting. Bending towards her, ‘I’m so glad to have this opportunity, Mrs. Fleming’. His smile broadened. ‘Or should I say, Mrs. Holland? I believe you spend a great deal of time overseas.’

A bolt shot through her. Her fork dropped. He knew. And was he going to betray her, let everyone hear?

‘Please. Sir Oliver, don’t – ’

‘My dear Mrs. Fleming, I had no intention – my foolish little joke.’

He paused. All round, voices were rising, conversation fuelled by the champagne. Glancing from side to side, she was satisfied no-one had overheard.

She waved away a dish loaded with bleeding slices of flesh.

‘Let us talk of other things, just now,’ Oliver Lodge went on kindly. ‘But perhaps later, in the conservatory, over our coffee, we might take up this conversation again?’

Almost composed, able to perform as she should, once more. But no risks, no topic that might be dangerous.

‘I would like that very much. Later. But at this moment, if it wouldn’t bore you dreadfully, Sir Oliver, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to hear you explain how the telegraph works. I know it’s to do with wave pulses and electricity. But I’m such a dunce about these matters.’

Embraced by the warm, smothering air of the conservatory, Trix shivered. It brought back Calcutta and feelings – not quite of distaste: they were almost like longing. She mustn’t linger over them, though. Now was her chance to explain her earlier show of nerves. Once Sir Oliver was stirring his coffee, she launched in.

‘You understand, my people, my brother Rudyard,’ – she couldn’t resist the boast, though she despised herself – ‘they’re all dead set against my work for the Society.’ She simply had to get that out of the way, explain why she’d been so alarmed. He mustn’t think her odd. ‘Some years ago I was rather ill and they insisted on blaming it on the automatic script.’

He nodded sympathetically. Encouraged, she took a moment to reach for her cup.

‘I find it quite irrational. My mother’s always claimed to have “the sight” – she’s a Macdonald, you know. And as for Ruddy, it’s his notion that a “daemon” takes over his writing at times and that’s what’s behind his best work.’

‘I’d no idea. Fascinating. I suppose he wouldn’t be interested in describing the experience? – no, I can see by your face that he would not. Nevertheless, if you’ll allow me I’ll just –’

He took a small notebook from his waistcoat pocket and scribbled.

‘I dare say your people don’t appreciate the scientific nature of our enterprise. My study of electromagnetism reinforces the idea that there is a realm beyond the material world. So we must now apply the methods of scientific investigation to that realm. Assemble our evidence with scrupulous care, make the tests we put it through rigorous. I see these explorations as an extension of my laboratory work.’

The relief of hearing those words from a man of his standing. A Fellow of the Royal Society. A university professor, celebrated for his inventions. The blossoms on the overhanging hibiscus blazed more brightly.

She became bold.

‘I have always been able to see things not apparent to others. Crystal vision is the least of it, actually, but it can all be rather a worry. The fact that these things are out of my control and can’t be explained.’

‘Remarkable,’ he was murmuring, but she didn’t pause. Her pulses were racing.

‘Understanding more would be such a help to me. Those tests you speak of. Can you tell me something about them? I’ve never been told how they work on my scripts. I just send them in to you, to the secretary, Miss Johnson, I mean, every week with no idea of what they might mean.’

‘That’s exactly what keeps our experiments pure, my dear Mrs. Fleming. Much better that you know as little as possible. No contamination that way.’

Trix stared at him, brought to a halt. Against her will, anger surged through her.

‘Contamination, Sir Oliver? Contamination if I knew what use my work was being put to? I’m not sure I understand.’

Her tone clearly took him by surprise.

‘It’s just a term we use. You see, we men of science have to question how far the scripts represent material from the automatist’s, that is the writer’s, own subliminal mind. That’s why we have to keep you and Mrs. Verrall and the other ladies in darkness. Our whole endeavour is to create stringent tests, to establish whether souls, having survived death, are communicating with us using a network of automatists. You, I may say, are the most gifted of them.’

She sat silent, not reassured. His words had left her still more troubled. Her own subliminal mind might be behind what she wrote? She flinched, remembering the constant note of appeal in her scripts, the naked longing: ‘I should die from sheer yearning to reach you … if I could only reach you – if I could only tell you – I long for power and all that comes to me is an infinite yearning – an infinite pain.’

The headache which had begun to threaten was making her eyes dazzle. Fortunately, nothing of her discomfort must be showing, for Sir Oliver was smiling benevolently at her and appeared to be speaking.

Trix took a deep breath and tried to listen.

‘You can have no idea, Mrs. Fleming, what a pleasure this is for me. I’ve been keeping track of your scripts ever since the cross-correspondence experiments, as we call them, began. Dear lady, I don’t think you know how exceptional you are. You can’t appreciate your own gifts. They seem to come to you by nature. But let me tell you this, very few persons can learn to develop anything like your capacities and skills, and that only after extensive training.’

‘I’m never sure that they’re natural, Sir Oliver, or even healthy. I get all sorts of pains and symptoms with the writing. And the jolt, if I’m interrupted, is downright unbearable. My nerves are left screaming and my whole body is thrown into disarray.’

‘Mrs. Fleming, we all make sacrifices in our different ways for the sake of progress. Promise me that for the sake of science you will persevere!’

She was dazed. So much more recognition than she could have hoped for. But she was all of a sudden quite used up.

‘Your encouragement does mean a great deal to me, Sir Oliver. Sometimes I’ve felt so isolated and unsure. Indeed I will do my best for you.’

She managed to squeeze out a few more words of thanks before making her excuses. Wending her way through the leaning palm branches, she made to go back into the body of the house and from there up the stairs towards her bedroom, a haven of silence and solitude.

A hateful confusion of feelings overwhelmed her once she was on her own.

But long practice had taught her how to deal with that. An hour on her bed, eau de cologne on her temples, and she was able to take pleasure in Sir Oliver’s praise. Even though no-one who might speak of it to her family must know, this confirmation was too thrilling to keep absolutely to herself. She swung her feet to the ground and went over to the desk, where her own morocco writing case lay open. Wait till Maud heard about this!

* * *

Rud left for Tisbury immediately on getting the wire, even though the hour was already late. Two years on, his mother’s life was drawing to a close.

The Mater’s health had been in decline for over a year, so he thought himself pretty well braced for the farewell to come. All the long moonlit drive across country from Bateman’s to The Gables, he was able to keep his mind on the scenery.

Trix arrived there almost as soon as he did, though she was coming all the way from Edinburgh. Only lucky that she wasn’t out in Calcutta but home on leave with Jack. Rud quailed as he followed Trix up the stairs. At the door of the sickroom, without speaking, they reached for each other’s hand.

Their father was kneeling beside the bed, stroking his wife’s forehead.

At the sight of her children, a smile hovered over the sunken face.

‘Dearest ones…’ Alice whispered.

Trix bent to kiss the clammy forehead.

‘Oh Mama, dearest Mama, don’t try to speak.’

Under the ticking silence that followed unbroken, Rud knew that he was being addressed. That the Mater wanted something from him. Was she asking him to say that he’d never suffered left behind in Southsea? That he forgave her? He froze.

Before long she drifted off into sleep. From that moment forward, until she died on the morning of the fourth day, she gave him no further signal.

Carrie came over before the funeral, to be with Lockwood and Rud, which meant she witnessed the first signs of disturbance in Trix. At first she didn’t recognise them for what they were.

‘No really, I’m not at all hungry. It’s always like this when I can’t sleep,’ Trix insisted at dinner, tugging anxiously at her fringe. Her plate untouched, she left the table.

‘She’s been showing tremendous composure,’ Rud reassured Carrie. ‘It’s all the more amazing since, as ever, she was thick as thieves with the Mater, even sleeping in a bed set up in her room when she came to Tisbury on visits.’

In response to her frown, he went on, ‘Yes, that did seem a bit much but it was the Mater’s idea, according to Trix.’

Not wholly convinced, Carrie could only hope that she and Rud would get away before Trix started causing problems. Nothing had prepared her for the scene that she found taking place in the drawing room on the morning of the funeral.

‘Now, Trix, you know you can’t go upstairs to see the Mater. The men are bringing the coffin down. Listen, you can hear them.’

Rud was holding his sister’s hand, straining, as Carrie saw, to keep her in the drawing room, away from their father. Lockwood was standing shrunk with grief, bareheaded by the wide space left by the open front door. Jack Fleming had taken himself away to the window where he stood with averted gaze. Impatient as she felt with Jack and all his limitations, with his constant worrying over his own health, she knew it had been an evil day for him when he married into the Kiplings.

The car was waiting for Lockwood and Rud. There was to be a quiet interment in the little churchyard: she could tell that for once both could accept and were even grateful for the ritual of religion to move them through the final necessary steps. She was tenderly helping Lockwood into his overcoat, wrapping a muffler round his neck against the November air, when Trix, who’d been left in Jack’s company, burst out of the drawing room.

‘You can’t go without me. I won’t let you,’ she was panting.

Rud and Lockwood turned to Carrie.

There was only one way to save the day. Hysterical altercations at this moment would be unbearable. It was not the thing for the women to attend funerals but needs must.

‘We’re waiting for you, Trix, hurry and get your warm things on.’

Without pausing to call for a maid, Carrie shrugged herself into her own black coat. The men wouldn’t care that Trix wasn’t wearing mourning. The great thing was to preserve a sense of solemnity, for their sake. Little as she’d cared for Mrs. Kipling, the coming of death levelled all scores. She really would try to do what she could for Trix.

Carrie almost pushed Trix ahead of her into the pew, making sure that she was hemmed in against the wall. Care of the Pater she would have to leave to Rud. But within minutes Trix was turning to look behind her, with a frank curiosity more fitting to a child. Carrie picked up the uneasy stir in the small congregation.

The vicar was just inviting them to join in the hymn when Trix decided to make her own contribution to the performance. Removing her hat, with great solemnity she waved it aloft, before clasping it to her bosom and bowing deeply to the pews behind. Though Carrie clutched at her arms and whispered fiercely, this had no effect. Worse, Trix demonstrated her resentment by throwing herself round to stare at the stonework, in another theatrical gesture, presenting Carrie with an angry back.

She filed after Carrie quietly enough when the time came. But though Carrie herself tried to appear recollected, at her side Trix blew kisses right and left as she trod down the aisle. Thank heavens, walking ahead, behind the coffin, Rud and his father continued unaware.

‘I want to go home now. Carrie, take me home,’ Trix demanded as they passed the last pew.

It was many a day since Carrie had heard words that were so welcome.

Home. Trix picked up her skirts and ran upstairs. The bed lay stripped and empty in her parents’ room.

She peered into the looking glass. So difficult to see with the blinds drawn.

‘Mama hasn’t gone away. She wouldn’t. She promised me.’

‘Look, I can see her, how alike we are; Mama’s dress is awfully like mine. I’m afraid it’s rather too young for her, but she never cared to admit her age. She always wanted all the admiration.’

Why did no-one answer?

Oh no. That dreadful Jack had followed her in and was trying to speak to her. She wouldn’t listen, no, she would cover her ears. He never listened. Never understood.

‘Go away, I shall never forgive you, you might as well know that.’

Had her voice been louder than she knew? Her hands were still over her ears. It must have been, for Carrie had come hurrying in. She was talking to Jack. Let her.

‘Get him out of my sight, Carrie. Mother doesn’t want him in the house.’

Such a fuss, too many people. It made her cry.

Yes, she would be a good girl for Father and drink the medicine.

Once Lockwood had led Trix away to her room, shaking his head at any move to accompany them, Carrie was left alone with Rud. He hadn’t a tinge of colour. She looked about but there was nowhere to sit in comfort. The ordinary routines of housekeeping in The Gables had lapsed. Drifts of papers in the study, trays with the remnants of meals left standing about.

They took refuge in the breakfast room, where at least someone had thought to have a fire lit. Drained by her own attempts to contain Trix, she was wondering how soon the two of them could get away.

Watching Rud as he stood, stiffly by the sideboard, not taking his eyes off the door, Carrie knew that she’d need all her force of persuasion.

‘It’s not the slightest use our staying on, you know.’

She wasn’t sure, at first, that he’d heard.

Beyond the cramped little window the winter afternoon was giving way to darkness. When he did speak, she was startled.

‘I can’t just abandon her,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘Without the Mater. She always trusted me.’

It was Trix and her distress that had struck home. Not his mother’s death at all. Extraordinary, when you thought how little they saw of each other. She was never going to be free of Trix.

Carrie left her place by the hearth to stand face-to-face with Rud. She obliged him to look at her.

Without saying anything, she gently brushed back his hair.

‘Darling Rud, there’s nothing you can do here.’

‘Do you want us to turn round and leave the Pater with this – this catastrophe on his hands?’ There was a catch in his voice but it was angry now, more alive.

She took a breath then made herself speak calmly, though she was desperate to take him away, out of this house and back to their own home, back to Bateman’s.

‘You’ve seen for yourself, he’s the only one Trix will take notice of. And don’t you think it may help him to have something urgent to occupy him?’

Rud looked stubborn. Before he could speak she hurried on ‘Think of South Africa, the hospitals. They were a lifeline to you when’ – she swallowed – ‘you told me so yourself.’

He blinked.

‘You’re right. They were.’

‘It may be the kindest thing we can do at this moment, leaving him with an occupation, don’t you see?’

It took a little more pressure on her part but they ate dinner that night home at Bateman’s.

He was slow to get back to work in the days that followed. She was accustomed to the way he shed responsibility for practical details, the planning and arranging of their lives. He cast it all on her.

‘I’m just a cork bobbing on the waters when I’m with Carrie.’

She used to love to hear him tell friends that, in the first years of their marriage. She was less enthusiastic today, as she sat at her desk.

‘Carrie, I’m bored.’

She knew it. Here he was, hanging about the door of her study, hands in pockets, shoulders slumped.

She must be patient. Not ten days since the funeral, what did she expect? A son loses his mother – this son loses that mother –

With a gesture towards the papers she was studying, she explained.

‘I’ve just got a few more things to see to, darling. Two or three letters and bills that must go off by the afternoon post and then I’ll be with you.’

She could walk him over to that couple of fields she meant to make an offer for. It was a good buy, land adjoining their own.

‘While you’re waiting, why don’t you send John a line? You know how you loved getting letters when you were away at school.’

‘I wrote to John yesterday.’

It didn’t seem wise to suggest a letter to Trix.

‘Well, have you looked at the papers yet?’ She tapped her fingers, quietly.

Usually he’d have spent an hour with the newspapers and then made straight for his desk. But all his routines were in abeyance, even if her own couldn’t just be dropped.

‘Nothing in the papers.’ As he stood kicking grumpily at the door frame, he reminded her of John at five years old.

Her smile broadened. It was in her to enjoy the comic side. Experience had taught her that he recovered from these periods of collapse, infuriating as they were to manage.

‘I’ll tell you what Rud. You sit down and write a note to your father.’ Forestalling all objections, ‘Just news of John, what was in his last letter, Elsie and her friends, what’s coming on in the garden – once you’ve finished that it will be time to get our waterproofs. We’ll be out in the fields for at least an hour and just look at that sky,’ she pointed to the window.

Wet or fine, she was going to get him out of the house and moving about. Otherwise he’d be on the sofa, eyes closed. He was not going to sleep the day away.

‘You won’t be long, will you?’ came the plaintive reply, as he wandered off into his own study.

She shook her head, picking up her pen. The day scarcely begun and already she was falling behind.

*

Stumbling as he moved about his studio, heavy, Lockwood felt every one of his seventy-four years. He had a new plan for soothing Trix today, though in his weariness he did not anticipate much success. She was talking incessantly, brightly, even, which was at least better than her charged silence, but her chatter quickly left him feeling drained.

‘Do you think we shall see Ruddy today? I do hope so, don’t you, Father? I’m sure he’ll bring Mama with him. But not Carrie, she’s always been so difficult. Elsie is dreadfully like her, don’t you think? Father, when do you think Mama will come?’

For the moment he had left her in the breakfast room leafing vigorously through the new issue of the Review of Reviews.

‘It’s the articles that begin with “J” that carry the secret,’ she flung over her shoulder as he left.

Now he laid sticks of charcoal and wide sheets of drawing paper out on the long table, as he used when the children came to his drawing class.

That was Before.

Now he must look after Trix.

When he fetched her, leading her by the hand, unresisting into the studio, for a moment he thought her little cry was one of pleasure.

But dropping his hand, she ran across the room, to snatch up the sheets of paper, screwing them into balls and tossing them away. Sticks of charcoal were ground underfoot before he could stop her.

Then he knew he could never let Trix inside his studio again. But she could not be left for more than couple of minutes or she might be down the drive, away on some fantastic errand. As he locked the studio door behind him, he knew himself exiled from the place where he’d always found comfort.

Visiting Tisbury, Rud was shocked by his father’s appearance.

‘For heaven’s sake, this is all too much for you. Let’s hire a nurse or send Trix somewhere that she can be looked after.’

‘Your mother would want me to care for Trix, she’d never forgive me if I left her care to strangers,’ he replied.

No question of help from her husband. In view of the fits of rage which the sight of him seemed to provoke, Rud could scarcely blame Fleming for retreating to London.

‘Pater, she’s more deranged now than I’ve ever seen her. She’s too much to manage at home: it’s a case for professionals. There’s no need to worry about the expense, I’ll cover any cost –’

‘Perhaps, in a week or two, if she doesn’t come round a bit,’ was the best he could get out of him.

Rud saw that his father was afraid. That he had put the exhausting distraction of Trix between himself and an agony of loss.

For himself, the company of Trix in such a state was the stuff of nightmare. He simply couldn’t remain in the house with her. He’d have to ask Carrie what they could do to protect his father.

Rud left, intending to make himself return.

When a brief note from Tisbury told him his father had given the care of Trix over to others, he knew he’d succeeded. He hurried in to Carrie with the good news.

‘He’s gone to Clouds, to stay with the Wyndhams, their old friends. They’ve carried him of for a rest. That might be best, for the moment but let’s get him over here soon.’

When a telegram arrived, ten days later, he knew it had all been too late.

For weeks he didn’t seem able to get warm.

Once the funeral was over, there remained the task of clearing the house. Jack Fleming had removed Trix to a nursing home.

Carrie found Rud in his father’s studio, where a steady drip from the leaking roof was keeping time. He was tying the strings of his father’s old apron around himself.

‘Useful to the end. He would have liked that,’ she spoke quietly, subdued by the effort to reason down her own helpless sense of loss.

‘Exactly. If we have to break up the little home here, let’s do it as though he were directing us.’ He was still dazed.

‘I can’t imagine a world without him,’ he’d told her, choking.

Rousing himself, ‘I’ll get down to the books now.’

He laid her hand briefly against his cheek, before making for the door. Then, turning, ‘I’ve been through the papers. One thing we must do before leaving is burn all those old letters. Our family life is entirely our own business. We don’t want anything falling into others’ hands. John will enjoy the bonfire.’

She glanced into the kitchen where Elsie was helping pack up the china. Most of it could go to charity but there were a few good pieces to be put aside. Before setting off to make her inventory of the carpets and hangings, which were of quite a different order of value and must come to Bateman’s, she went out through the back door into the garden, looking for John. She found him by a carefully selected pile of stones, practising his aim, taking the white birch by the fence as his target.

‘For heaven’s sake, John, come in and get those hands clean. Daddy needs you to help him and you aren’t fit to go near a book.’

Reluctantly, thirteen-year-old John went off in search of soap and water.

He was still brown as a nut from skating all day outside on the rink at Engelberg. The children didn’t seem to miss their winters in South Africa.

‘I don’t mind lessons as long as they’re to learn skating,’ John had conceded.

Winter sports were small consolation to her for giving up those slow melting days at The Woolsack.

She pulled her jacket round her, shivering, as she went back into the house. A deadly chill had set in, now it stood empty.

There’d really been no alternative, they just had to give up South Africa, after 1908. It made Rud so angry to see how affairs out at the Cape were going.

‘It’s an unholy mess. Less than five years after a big war, the enemy are given control of the revenues and administration of the conquered country,’ he repeated to anyone who would listen.

It was better they should not go back.

Within weeks of Lockwood’s funeral, Rud got Jack Fleming to meet them both in London to discuss what should be done about Trix. They sat awkwardly together round a table in a private sitting room at Brown’s hotel.

‘I have the greatest faith in Dr. Williams-Freeman,’ intoned Fleming. ‘He intends to keep Trix in his nursing home for as long as she remains dangerously disturbed. Meanwhile, I am making out papers for the Lunacy Board, as Trix is clearly in no state to manage her own affairs.’

Rud drew in his breath sharply. It was a moment before he could speak. The Lunacy Board! Trix! He was technically powerless. The fellow was her husband.

Carrie threw him a look of alarm.

Clearing his throat, ‘You’re quite convinced that is necessary, Fleming? The Lunacy Board: is her case really hopeless?’

‘All I know is that I cannot answer, I’ll not be held responsible, for anything she may do.’

His brother-in-law sat, arms folded, stiffly upright in the high backed chair.

‘Did you realise that she’s been in correspondence with the Society for Psychical Research?’ he continued.

Rud recoiled.

Naturally, the fellow had to deal with any letters that came for her. But he was torn between distaste for Fleming and outrage at Trix. Leaning forward, he gripped the edge of the table.

‘You mean to say that Trix was a member of the Society for Psychical Research? In spite of everything? The warnings I gave her? The way that damned writing set off her first breakdown?’

‘My family don’t share your views. They thought it quite innocent, a form of amusement, looking in the crystal and palm reading,’ Jack Fleming blustered. ‘My sister Moona encourages it when we’re up there on leave.’ In the face of Rud’s fury, he added sullenly, ‘I never authorised it. Hate the whole bag of tricks.’

Carrie stayed at home the following week, when Rud went up to London on his own. Returning in the late afternoon, he came out to find her out on the lawn admiring a magnolia that spread itself against the house.

‘It’s almost completely out now,’ she called.

His answering smile was half-hearted.

‘Can we go inside?’ he asked, once he got up to her.

She followed him over the terrace and into the drawing room, apprehensive.

He took the nearest chair, motioning her to one close by.

‘I gritted my teeth and asked Arthur Doyle what he could tell us.’

She was taken by surprise. He’d drawn back from Mr. Doyle since he’d gone head over heels for spiritualism. ‘If only the man’d stick to Holmes and Baker Street, keep his feet on the ground,’ he’d complain.

‘Asked him if he’d heard anything about Trix and her psychic activities?’ She knew what that must have cost him.

‘No wonder she can’t keep things straight in her head,’ he exploded. ‘You’ll find this difficult to credit. She’s made a career out of that business’ – he disdained to name automatic writing – ‘a whole career. In that world Trix is famous.’

‘Are they aware that she’s your sister?’ she returned in alarm.

‘Apparently not, but that’s hardly the point. However, I agree, it’s a relief. Doyle only worked it out by putting two and two together and he’ll keep mum.’

His irritation was infectious, she had grown taut.

‘She’s made a name for herself – quite literally, he continued. ‘They know her as the celebrated medium “Mrs. Holland”. And in a horrible backhand way, she’s made a name as a writer. She’s one of the authors of what they call the “Cross-correspondences”. Awfully proud of her, that blessed Society, it seems.’

Responding to her blank look, he added, ‘Sets of messages, apparently transmitted by telepathy between England and India etcetera. Don’t ask me. A Mrs. Verrall, one of those female professors at Cambridge, is involved in it too, I believe. According to Doyle, that college for advanced women, Newnham, is riddled with it.’

They sat in silence for some time, taking this in. The sunshine was beckoning to her from outside and she longed to suggest a stroll in the garden before dinner but it was no moment for interruptions.

‘Do you think we should tackle her?’ she began, then corrected herself. ‘I’m sorry, that’s nonsense, what would be the point?’

‘Remembering the last go, it could be years before anyone gets sense out of Trix again,’ he nodded miserably. ‘There’s nothing we can do for her now, except to be kind. And encourage that idiot Fleming to keep away from her, if possible.’

*

The voice said ‘It’s a year you’ve been here, stupid. Andover, don’t you remember? I told you the last time I came on duty.’

terrifying   so helpless

shut down
this rage
sweeping

weak after attacks weak       the fear

she had no idea what she might have said.
or done

people frightened of her

No-one came close

she liked that
she woke up crying

Some days it was quieter inside her head.
More and more days.

Now they let her wear her own clothes once more.

*

‘But I feel I will never be the same again,’ she told Dr. Williams-Freeman, as he sat at his heavy desk behind a bowl of artificial flowers. Her husband had entrusted her to this man’s care.

‘My dear Mrs. Fleming, you sound like a good child who has once fallen into naughtiness and now believes they will never be good again.’

The man was a perfect fool. She was not a child.

But she was being treated like one, like a naughty child who must be sent away till they have learned to be good.

*

Three years on and Trix was still without a proper home. She and her current nurse had just moved to Scarborough.

‘Lovely views, dear, and wonderful air,’ declared Nurse Tomkins, inspecting the rooms that had been taken for them up on Castle Road, poised above the great double scoop of the bay.

‘I believe one of the Brontë sisters is buried in that churchyard along the street,’ Trix offered.

Nurse offered clucks of sympathy in reply.

Brisk fingers of that wonderful air made their way into the sitting room even when the sash windows were firmly closed, moving Trix to clutch her Shetland shawls close round her. The gaunt mahogany furniture crowded in. Fretting, she took herself to the windows, but she had to grip the frames as she gazed out, for fear of falling into the vast emptiness that lay between her and the wash of the sea.

‘I know you don’t like me to bother with the newspaper, Nurse, but I’d love just five minutes with it again today,’ Trix asked, folding her napkin carefully as she finished breakfast.

Nurse Tomkins hesitated. Delaying her reply, she moved over to the window to consult the weather.

‘I really think we might get a walk in before the rain if we don’t put it off,’ she observed.

Mrs. Fleming could give her a tiring hour or two if she became excited. On the other hand, refusing might produce as much rumpus as overstimulation. She had strict orders to allow this patient pen and paper only under close supervision. None of that automatic writing. In view of her professional experience of similar cases, she’d had no trouble in agreeing. It was like a drug to them and afterwards they were not themselves, not at all. A pity, though, that they mustn’t even read the tea leaves, let alone the cards, together.

‘I dare say, dear, by and by,’ she offered, adjusting her cap.

Now and again she did let Mrs. Fleming have a glimpse of the newspaper, just for a treat. She really preferred her patients to read only knitting patterns. Then they were learning to amuse themselves and be useful while keeping calm.

She scrutinised her patient again.

Mrs. Fleming hadn’t had a bad day in all the past fortnight, not since Colonel Fleming’s last letter. And she was such a sweet lady, you did want to bring a smile to those large mournful eyes.

‘You don’t believe me, Nurse, do you?’ She’d exclaimed sadly one afternoon. ‘I really did write novels and stories and have them published before I moved on to higher things. Maud Diver, you know who I mean, don’t you? The famous novelist, we’ve been friends ever since we were girls.’ And rummaging along her little bookcase, Mrs. Fleming picked out a copy of Maud Diver’s The Amulet. It opened at the printed inscription, ‘This book is dedicated to Trix Fleming in memory of Dalhousie days.’

It’d been a shame to see her dab her eyes.

Delving into her bag where the paper lay folded, waiting to be read after lunch while her patient slept, Nurse Tomkins decided to risk it. At least it was the Morning Post, something respectable, not one of those rags some went in for.

Trix picked at a hangnail. All Jack wanted was to be rid of her, hide her away. Between them Jack and the doctors had cut her off, trapped her and kept her from knowing what was going on in the world. She did hear regularly from Rud, but he only told her about his new dog or the home farm at Bateman’s, safe topics designed not to upset her. Nothing about the war.

She really needed a file for this. It would do later.

She’d been wondering a good deal about him with this war. In its second year now. Those repeated warnings, his emphasis on being ready to defend ourselves, they’d been justified. She longed to know what he was publishing these days. It was a bit of luck that Nurse Tomkins ran to the Morning Post. He often wrote for it.

She turned swiftly past the advertisements and the dreadful close-printed lists of the Roll of Honour. So many dead, where was the honour in that? Ah, here was the international news on page seven, alongside the Court Circular. As she held the sheets out wide, preparing to concentrate, one name leapt to her eye.

‘Dear God,’ the words dried on her lips. ‘The death of Mr. John Kipling.’

Nurse Tomkins rose to her feet but made no other move.

Trix laid the paper down and gathered herself.

‘It’s my brother. I mean, it’s his boy,’ she spoke mechanically. Then she read flinching through to the end.

‘reported ‘missing, believed killed’ … boy for whom Puck told the tales of the beloved land … for which this supreme sacrifice … barely eighteen … indomitable courage … nominated for the Irish Guards by Lord Roberts ….

Determined to take his share … urgent pleas … father … mother also … dearest of all possible sacrifices … altar of their country … only son … sympathy of the whole Empire.’

Only son. Missing, believed killed. She looked up, stammering. ‘Oh, Ruddy, Ruddy! I can’t bear it.’

Nurse Tomkins was baffled to hear her sob: ‘He was all I had.’

She sank to kneel at her patient’s side. The wild gaze that was turned on her then showed what a mistake the newspaper had been.

‘You won’t leave me, Auntie, will you? I’ll be very good.’

Mrs. Fleming wasn’t the first patient to call Nurse Tomkins by another’s name. Auntie? She didn’t argue, she joined in. ‘Now, Trixie dear, you mustn’t go upsetting yourself like this.’

But Trix was pawing at the white uniform of her keeper.

‘Promise you won’t go away. Promise.’

The nurse took the frantic hands firmly in her own.

‘Of course, dear, don’t you worry, I’m going to stay here with you. But it’s time for our rest now, there’s a good girl. I’ll sit by you till you drop off.’

The flowered eiderdown drawn up round her chin, the draught swallowed, Trix lay obedient. Moment by moment a low sound came to be heard. As the humming grew stronger it gave way to unfamiliar words, perhaps those of a lullaby:

‘eekre, eekre, bus re morah,
hara kha, pani pi
phir, ooran ja’.

It wasn’t English, Nurse Tomkins realised, something foreign, from when her patient lived abroad perhaps, but it seemed to soothe the poor thing. After a week or two, she ventured to ask Mrs. Fleming about her song but she didn’t seem able to remember.

The touch of a circling finger, brown on her own small pink palm, that once accompanied that Marathi lullaby, had passed beyond recall.

*

1920 now and the war over but Trix was still on the move, in the custody of paid companions.

The afternoon post arrived rather late that day. Trix was still reading Maud’s letter when Mrs. Fotheringay, her new companion, announced a change of plan. Lodgings had been taken for them in Cheltenham.

‘Cheltenham. I suppose I might as well go there as anywhere. How long have I been here in Guildford? It must be more than six months.’

‘Now, Mrs Fleming, try to be more positive.’ Mrs. Fotheringay, put a ridiculous value on brightness.

‘Am I not permitted to complain at all?’

Trix heard her own voice turn waspish.

Mrs. Fotheringay looked back at her, prim.

‘Colonel Fleming explained in his letter of instruction that he thought taking the waters might do you good, my dear.’

‘Do me good?’ She crumpled Maud’s letter as her hand clenched into a fist. ‘If he wants to do me good he might start by writing to me direct, asking for my opinion. And did he explain when this traipsing about the country will come to an end? Have you any idea how many sets of dreary lodgings I’ve moved into?’

‘You’re to have your photograph taken once we get to Cheltenham. Isn’t that a nice surprise? Quite a little treat –’

Not to be distracted, Trix broke in.

‘Whatever for? My photograph! What’s Jack planning to do now?

She stood, clasping her hands together to prevent them from shaking.

‘I believe it’s for your passport, Mrs. Fleming,’ the other replied with maddening calm.

Trix sat abruptly, feeling the blood leave her face.

‘He means to really get rid of me,’ she quavered. ‘Some awful cheap rundown European spa, in the back of beyond, somewhere I don’t know the language.’

‘Well, if I may say so, Mrs. Fleming, it’s all in your own hands. I’m sure the Colonel would be only too happy to have his wife at home with him, if she could behave like other ladies.’

Trix understood that a mask was being held out to her. But she was not yet so desperate that she would consent to hide herself.

‘Unduly irritable,’ Mrs. Fotheringay would write in her weekly report.

*

‘According to the newspapers, the Isle of Wight is bathed in spring sunshine,’ Carrie urged, laying down her knife at the end of breakfast. ‘A few days there would do us all good, don’t you think?’

She threw a glance of appeal at her daughter. At twenty-six, Elsie was still living at home.

Rud remained silent, preoccupied. He’d hardly touched his egg.

‘Absolutely, do let’s, you will come too, won’t you?’ Elsie responded loyally, looking beseechingly at her cousin Lorna, who was staying with them.

‘You see it’s because of Great-Aunt Georgie dying,’ Elsie interpreted, once she was alone with Lorna in the old schoolroom at Bateman’s. She’d taken it over for entertaining her own visitors.

Her cousin appeared confused.

‘Mummy’s trying to outrun death, or at least its effect on Dadda. He hasn’t picked up in the weeks since Georgie’s funeral. The plan will be to distract him by arranging to go away and then to set him down in the sun. It’s not a bad idea; he’s always ready for the off. And I think Mummy told me her brother, the one who died, used to have a house at a place called Chale on the Isle of Wight. Before the Flood.’

The young women’s laughter was good natured.

Carrie had mixed feelings embarking on the ferry back to Portsmouth at the end of that trip. She left Elsie and Lorna to stand at the bow, heads thrown back, lacquered cheeks whipped into natural colour by the wind, while she remained close to Rud, looking down over the ship’s rail at the stern.

The promised sun had been slow to materialise but that was not all that had troubled her. She’d not allowed for the strength of the past. As the ferry drew slowly away from Ventnor, with its bright little harbour, Rud must have felt rather than heard her muffled sob. He tucked her hand under his arm.

‘Long farewell, dear heart, isn’t it? Long farewell to Wolcott and to our own young days.’

Their visit to the Isle of Wight had turned out to be a kind of pilgrimage. In 1891, one way and another, they’d spent a good part of the summer there, Carrie keeping house for Wolcott with her mother and sister, with Rud training down from London to join them every chance he could. Wolcott’s last summer. And now her mother too was dead, had been dead a whole year. The past was closing up behind them, vanishing as they watched, like the pale wake sinking into the winter sea.

Vanished away too, beyond her reach, beyond her touch, her own lost children.

Rud was speaking.

‘Come now, you mustn’t get cold, we’ll go inside.’

Once seated in the stuffy little cabin, Rud surprised her with an invitation.

‘You know that when we dock at Portsmouth the girls are leaving us and going off on the London train. Johnson will be waiting with the Rolls and I could get him to drive the two of us over to Southsea. It’s no distance. As a small boy I used to walk it with Uncle Pryse when he went to collect his pension at the Dockyard. We could see if we can find the House of Desolation.’

Carrie drew breath. This was the last thing she’d expected. But that eager look of his – she mustn’t disappoint him. Just let this not be the start of anything too bad. ‘I would like that, Rud. If you’re sure you’re up to it. It might be good for us to go back together, after all this time.’

Rud told the driver to stop in Outram Road.

‘Let’s walk from here. This was my route back from that miserable little apology for a school.’

She kept her hand in his after he’d helped her out of the car.

They moved off together along the suburban street with its grey starved gardens. His increasing tension was transmitted to her right down his arm.

‘There it is. Lorne Lodge.’

He had come to an abrupt halt as Outram Road swung round and gave way to Havelock Park. The mean little detached house with its narrow brick arch over the gate would have spoken of pretension, not despair, to an outsider. Rud didn’t seem to want to cross the road but eyed it from the pavement opposite.

‘Our mother gone without a word. I wasn’t quite six. Trix was just three. A huge gap at that age. I felt as responsible as though I were her father.’

Carrie judged it best to listen without interrupting.

Rud went on: ‘I could see what it was doing to Trix, could sense it, though of course I couldn’t put a name to it as a child. The devil himself was in that woman to do that to children. I came damned near losing my mind with fear, between her own cursed punishments and the threats of a God who intended us to burn in flames for our sins.’

She’d heard it all before, or something like it, even to weariness. Yet standing beside him, before the very house, for a moment she was overwhelmed with terror. Carrie found herself struggling for breath.

He hadn’t finished.

‘When I think how it was when our own kids were small. How we shielded them, how we’d have died –’ his voice broke.

She saw that he couldn’t go on, that Josephine and her memory, with their own failure to keep her safe, had come between them.

‘Darling Rud, let’s just walk to the end of this street, then we can turn back to the car and you can shake the dust of this place from your heels for ever.’

* * *

The first that Moona knew of Trix’s return to grace was a pressing invitation from her brother, Jack, to inspect the new Edinburgh house he’d bought. ‘Just a step away from Eglinton Crescent, you’ll not have to come far.’ Ten years his senior, at 76, Moona resented the suggestion that a ten minute walk would be too much for her.

‘You’ve done well, Jack,’ she told him as they reached the end of the tour. He had marched her room by room through the three floors of 6 West Coates.

He looked gratified.

‘Have you marked the craftsmanship in the doors and fittings?’ he pressed.

‘The work of skilled men,’ she agreed, ‘It’ll be a pleasure to you living here.’

But Moona was curious. She’d not been best pleased when he sold the home in Napier Road where they’d grown up, though she understood his frustration. Angry outbursts and scenes of distress had marked the brief periods some years earlier when he’d tried to bring Trix there to live with him. He’d taken to bachelor’s lodgings after that.

What was young Jack up to, buying a large detached house at this stage?

She was longing for a cup of tea but there was no chance of being offered one in this echoing unfurnished shell. She’d have to wait till she got home. Jack never gave any thought to making life comfortable for himself or anyone else.

At that moment a new idea struck her. Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps comfort was precisely what he had in mind. Was that why she’d been subjected to this tour?

Silent under her umbrella, Jack tall beside her as they trod towards Eglinton Crescent, Moona became increasingly sure that she was correct. That was no house for a bachelor. Jack wanted her help.

He was feeling his age, she suspected smugly. He wanted a home of his own again and companionship. But he meant to learn how the land lay before he made any overtures.

‘Do you not think you might be lonely in that fine mansion?’ she asked, holding out a full cup to him, as they sat by her fireside, facing each other over the tea tray. ‘Would you like me to go and see how things stand nowadays with Trix?’

Moona liked the thought of getting things back on a decent footing. Jack used to bring Trix up to Scotland every leave before Mrs. Kipling died and Moona’d grown fond of her, flighty as she was. She’d be in her fifties now. The family had all wondered at Jack and the way he’d sent her off. He’d never been a patient man. It was no way to treat a sick woman. But there’d been no talking to him.

A visit from Moona? Trix was almost more frightened than pleased, as she sat reading the note from her sister-in-law. The egg congealed on her plate unnoticed. Did this mean some new scheme of Jack’s was afoot? Over the hours that followed she struggled to think of a way to protect herself.

On the day itself she summoned her dignity and insisted on receiving her visitor alone.

‘I’ll ring if I need you, Mrs. Postle,’ she promised.

She could tell at once that her appearance shocked Moona. Trix knew that she’d aged quite dreadfully. But there was no hesitation, no sisterly peck. Stepping forward, Moona folded Trix into her embrace.

Trix felt her eyes fill with tears. Oh no, she was going to look weak and silly. As they moved apart, however, she realised that Moona was dabbing her own eyes.

‘My dear,’ Moona said, a catch in her voice, ‘it’s more than time. Jack wants me to ask you to – to make your home with him once more.’

In the silence that followed Trix tried to remain calm. Before she was ready to reply, Moona spoke again.

‘I won’t deny that he’s stiff and a difficult man but he does try to do his best, according to his lights. It will never be easy living with him. But 6 West Coates is a large house.’ She paused before adding simply ‘You would have your own separate bedroom.’

Trix’s heart was beating fast. She nodded.

‘I’m not a child. I do know what it’s like, living with Jack.’

Hands clutched at her breast, she hesitated.

‘But I don’t think I could bear … if it wasn’t to be permanent … I couldn’t join him on notice, like a housemaid.’

Moona looked horrified.

‘I’ll be making it quite clear to him that if you are generous enough to return to his home there’ll be no going back.’

As Trix blinked, uncertain, Moona added, ‘I wouldn’t expect you to decide all in a moment, my dear. This has been hard on you. Sleep on it.’

‘I’m not sure I have any choice,’ Trix said slowly. ‘At least it will be better than this – ’ and she waved her hand around at the dingy rented sitting room with its limp, sun-shrunk curtains.

* * *

6, West Coates, which Jack had bought at an advantageous price, as Trix came to discover, was a little too close to Haymarket Station. With its heavy baronial decoration the place radiated a prosperous security, which she both welcomed and detested. Yet she had succeeded in making a life for herself in Edinburgh, she acknowledged, stepping briskly out in the fine morning. She’d put those twelve years spent in the wilderness behind her.

‘I do find these shops a great comfort,’ she murmured aloud, once inside Mademoiselle Zephirine’s atelier, as she hovered over the enticing display of new millinery for spring.

Knowing where to lay hands on a good dress or a becoming hat kept her spirits up. These light colours certainly were flattering. Or was she deceiving herself? She tilted her head towards the shop mirror, wanting to see the effect of the mauve cloche from a different angle. Yes, it was decidedly pleasing.

‘Thank you so much, I’ll take this one, Maisie.’ The girls in the shops were so pleasant and friendly, she’d got to know every one of them by name and they always had a smile for her.

As she waited, tissue rustled deliciously.

What a relief that her looks had definitely come back. Those hollow eyes in the glass used to give her the shivers. It did make a difference, being established here, at the centre of a family again, with Moona, living virtually on the doorstep. A very kind woman, if sometimes almost too bracing.

With the striped hatbox over her arm, Trix set off on her favourite outing, to visit the Zoo. She was meeting a young cousin there. Finding herself popular with the next generation had come as a delightful surprise: they positively vied for time with her. ‘You’re so amusing, so witty and entertaining Aunt Trix,’ Betty Macdonald had insisted. ‘There’s never a dull moment with you.’

Did they really enjoy those tales of her young days, she wondered anxiously as she crossed over Prince’s Street. She knew she did embroider, just a scrap. It was innocent enough, just like the odds and ends she scribbled now and then for her own amusement.

She was afraid that sometimes she talked too much, but she did love company.

Next day, coming down to breakfast, Trix was still pleased with herself at finding that hat. Her eyes brightened further, as she glanced over the pile of mail. She took her time in opening the envelope. Just the sight of Rud’s hand had made her heart lift. She would stretch out the pleasure of feeling him close. The same excitement sparked in her every week when she found his letter. It had arrived early this time; she hadn’t been expecting one till Thursday.

Across the breakfast table her husband was absorbed in laying out his pills for the day. She wanted to let no sign of her pleasure escape, for Jack was sure to growl something disparaging on hearing Rud’s name.

‘Oh dear, this one is rather short.’ She couldn’t help herself, after all.

Jack, however, made no response. She thought he’d been growing deaf, though she couldn’t be sure. Was it that he just didn’t want to hear what she said?

Relieved by his silence, she returned to the page.

‘Dear Trix

I’m sure you will be interested to know that our Elsie is engaged to a man who was in the Irish Guards (Captain George Bambridge M.C.) and who is now attaché at the Madrid Embassy.

They have known each other for five years; he is a man whom we thoroughly like; and I hope they’ll be very happy. They expect to be married in the autumn.

Ever your loving

Brother.’

With great deliberation Jack was unfolding The Scotsman. She knew he didn’t care to be interrupted in his task, or even spoken to before he had sipped his way through a tepid glass of boiled water. But she had to speak.

‘Can you imagine, Jack, Elsie’s engaged. It’s a man who was in the Irish Guards with John. So terribly sad, I don’t like to think of it but one can’t help it, can one, when one is reminded like this?’

Her husband grunted. He did not put down his glass.

‘I do hope he’s the right man for her. Rud’s often told me that Elsie reminds him of me. The same profile, perhaps; in snaps she has a quite distinguished air.’

She put her head on one side, appealing.

‘But Jack, can you remember reading anything about this man in Rud’s book about the Irish Guards?’

‘What man, can you not give me a name, Trix. You go babbling on –’

She hadn’t waited for him but continued, ‘That History of the Irish Guards in the Great War, it took him years, you know. Step by step, company by company. The detail. I simply don’t know how he did it; Rud’s never been one for facts. Father used to twit him about it. Check your sources, my boy, he’d say when Rud was on the old CMG. Don’t you remember?’

‘I can’t say that I do. But then I was never in on your family games with the writing. I’ll tell you one thing, though, woman. Your brother drove himself to write that book for his son. Now are you going to give me the name of this young fellow of Elsie’s or not?’

‘I can understand his writing those Epitaphs of the War, though. They were based on classical models, you know, Jack. Rud and I used to write parodies together, when I was seventeen, it was one of our favourites. Such happy times, I sometimes wonder whether he’s been really happy since. Did you ever read any of them I can’t remember whether I showed you?’

Jack Fleming, who had endured the Greek Elegies as a schoolboy, threw down his napkin and placed both hands flat on the table. He rose, taking up his newspaper.

‘If I cannot take my breakfast in peace, Trix, I’ll be off.’

Trix’s hands began to shake. ‘Oh no, Jack, please – I’ll just read the rest of my letters, I won’t speak another word.’

She was only pretending to read. Married next October. Would they let her go to the wedding? She had a right to be there. Rud would want it, surely. But Carrie? She was always ready to make difficulties.

The weeks passed.

‘Carrie’s leaving it very late sending out the invitations. It’s not a bit like her: she can’t bear not to be on top of everything,’ Trix wondered aloud one evening, as they sat putting in the hours till it was time to go to bed.

Without raising his eyes from the Journal of the Royal Geographic Society, Jack Fleming responded.

‘Not at all, Trix. Our invitation came last week.’

She let her book fall.

‘What do you mean? I never saw it.’

‘I opened it. You were out shopping. The invitation was addressed to both of us and I answered for us both.’

‘Oh Jack, do say we can make a real trip of it, have a whole week in London,’ she cried.

‘Surely you don’t imagine you’re fit to travel and see all those people. I declined – civilly, of course. I explained that your health would not permit it.’

Drawing the band from her thin finger, Trix hurled it at her husband and swept from the room.

*

At Bateman’s, Carrie was still in two minds about Elsie’s wedding clothes.

‘We have to think, too, of how it will read in the newspaper. “The bride’s sole ornament was a single string of pearls” or something of the sort strikes a note of sobriety,’ she advised, as she sat, notebook in hand, on her daughter’s bed.

Elsie, who had been leaning back on her heels, searching among empty shoe boxes and drifts of tissue paper, turned to scrutinize her.

‘Don’t tell me you’re losing your nerve, Mother. Not after egging me on all this while. I’ve never seen you so enraptured as you were with the effect of that satin, once they laid the silver lace over it. “Day-lilies under frost,” that’s what you said.’

‘And so I am, enraptured. But it’s those colours. We don’t want to give the impression we’re striving for effect. Restricting yourself to Peggy Leigh, a single bridesmaid, is bold enough these days, when eight seems to be the fashion. But dressing Peggy in yellow velvet, without a wreath but a brown velvet hat instead – I just don’t want us to have gone too far.’

‘My sheaf of lilies will be chaste enough,’ looking sideways at her mother.

‘If that’s a joke, my dear, it’s not a very nice one.’

Elsie scrambled to her feet.

‘Come on, Mother, I’m not a blushing ingénue, I’m pushing thirty.’

That was rather harsh. Carrie made a deprecatory gesture.

‘How different, from the time when your father and I married, all in a rush, in the middle of winter. I barely had a chance to comb my hair, let alone order wedding clothes.’

Elsie gave an indulgent smile.

‘You know you’re just in love with that orange brocaded coat shot with blue that we chose to wear over the orange crêpe de chine I’m going away in. I’ve watched you stroking the nutria trim.’

‘It really is the height of style. And no more than your father’s daughter should be able to carry off – ’

‘And what about my mother’s daughter?’

Carrie didn’t hesitate.

‘Your mother, Elsie dearest, is the one who insisted that the hat to wear with that coat had to be in mole-coloured crêpe georgette. The orange velvet one you wanted would have made the whole effect look like something out of the Ballets Russes.’

‘I do hope George is going to appreciate the lovely things we’ve chosen,’ Elsie ventured at last.

There was a perceptible silence.

‘You never know with men. George is such a man’s man, I wouldn’t pin my hopes on it.’

‘I told Peggy I’d telephone her before lunch,’ Elsie excused herself, moving towards the door. We need to talk about stockings. She’s found a marvellous little place.’

*

The morning after the wedding Rud and Carrie were sitting over a late breakfast in Brown’s hotel. Ever since they passed the first nights of their honeymoon under its roof, Brown’s had served them as a London home.

Now they sat, each contemplating the fact that the previous day had seen them waving their only child goodbye. A bride with her new husband.

Partnered by a single forlorn glove of Carrie’s, Rud’s top hat still lay on the desk over by the window, where he had dropped it the night before. He was seated, newspaper in hand, across the table from her.

Though he’d drafted the notice for The Times himself, he still quailed at the remorseless description, Elsie, only child of Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling. But he must make an effort for Carrie’s sake. Mothers losing a daughter to marriage – the turmoil was considerable. To say nothing of the work Carrie had put in. Efficient though she was, organising always left her exhausted. Thank the Lord he hadn’t had the planning for five hundred guests.

‘I never felt more equal to being looked at, going up the aisle at St. Margaret’s with that vision on my arm.’ With the same classical profile and in certain gestures, the Child had grown to remind him so much of Trix. It had almost felt as though he were giving Trix away, instead.

There had been no question of Trix being present, even though she was able to live at home these days. They all agreed that keeping house for her husband in Edinburgh was quite enough excitement.

Carrie’s strained face relaxed. She took a sip of coffee.

‘She did look happy, didn’t she? And I was so relieved that there were no accidents with that long train –’

‘Yes, she did. Happy and beautiful. But, oh, did I tell you? You remember the little girl who works the lift here?’

‘The one you’ve been feeding books to, you with your soft heart?’

‘What else could I do? Leave the little thing adrift among the penny dreadfuls? Anyway, the girl looked at Elsie in all her glory with such big eyes when she was taking us down yesterday, that I picked out a bud from the Child’s bouquet and gave it her.’

He chewed at his toast cautiously, mindful of his dentures.

‘But what a performance,’ he continued, swallowing. ‘I still think a country wedding might have been easier.’

‘With a maypole, I suppose, and jousting?’ she snapped, evidently not yet ready to be teased.

‘Rud, you can be such a child. We went over this so many times: with five hundred guests to accommodate and the weather not to be relied on this late in October. Cousin Stan’s house in Eaton Square was the perfect solution. There were double that number in St. Margaret’s. Where would they have been put in the little church at Burwash?’

‘I don’t grudge the expense, you know that,’ he attempted to calm her.

‘No, but you did try us dreadfully about all the fittings and changing our minds.’

‘I don’t see what all the excitement’s about. A new pair of trousers doesn’t seem to lift my spirits in the same way.’

At last, he’d made her laugh.

As she poured herself a second cup, Carrie wondered whether she would ever plan another shopping campaign with Elsie. Married and living in Brussels, with a husband newly posted to the Embassy, Elsie would be looking to Paris rather than London. But would she want her mother’s company there?

‘I hope we don’t live to regret that generous settlement you made on her. It would be a pity if it encouraged George to be less active in finding his place in the world. Being honorary attaché in Brussels won’t do for ever.’

Rud didn’t answer directly. She’d watched him put aside his better judgment, in order to accept Elsie’s choice of husband. When they first met him, years before, they’d taken George Bambridge for a decent enough fellow, and so he appeared, now they knew him better. But was he up to Elsie’s standards, worthy of her?

A wasp, come in through the open window, was circling the marmalade. Rud flicked at it with his napkin.

As she’d expected, he dismissed her and made excuses for his new son-in-law.

‘Plenty of good men in worse case than Bambridge, after this war. Not just the officers employed on commission in motor car showrooms. It’s a scandal. Men who fought in the trenches selling boot-laces in the street.’

She shivered. Those haunted men on every corner. She had to hurry past.

And what would John have come back to? Her jaw tightened. The question hung unspoken between them. Both of them would have given up all his radiant prospects, taken even a crippled, blinded son back with thankful hearts.

Sorrow had made them selfish.

‘We kept Elsie with us far too long, I blame myself,’ she grieved.

His face was sombre as he nodded.

‘When I saw how she sparkled at the prospect of a house of her own, my heart did smite me.’

No question of admitting any qualms about Elsie’s husband. She might have known. Perhaps after all that was for the best.

‘George was extremely dashing in his uniform. He makes a fine figure,’ she conceded.

‘Sound chap, very straight. Not up to our Elsie in matters of intellect of course but I’ve always found a clever wife a great advantage, myself.’

Coming round the table, he bent over her where she sat and kissed her.

Now they had only to brace themselves for the afternoon, with its homecoming, for the entrance into a house from which the only child had departed.

*

Trix and Jack Fleming were in London for the week and were coming down to Bateman’s for the day. It was only one day. Carrie could perfectly tolerate it. Besides, any visitor, even Trix Fleming, brought some life back into the house.

Between them, she and Rud made sure there were many visitors.

She stood indecisive in the hall. Perhaps the white tulips she’d intended for the centre of the table would be better in a different vase. Setting it down, she stood back to consider the effect.

The echoes of her steps on the black and white chequers died away.

Always so still in here, where there’d been such bustle in the first year of the War. Before John died and all her energy went with him. Parcels piled all over the hall, giant bundles of old linen for bandages, sent from the States, wool in hundred pound packs waiting to be given out and knitted up. A mitten a day, that’s what she and Elsie had set themselves. On Thursdays a pair.

Her hands were chilled after doing the flowers, she rubbed them together.

And now Elsie was mistress of her own house, or should be, if only that husband of hers could settle to some occupation. George Bambridge was turning out every bit as unsatisfactory as she’d feared.

Eight years married and no sign of children. Carrie was well aware of what remained unspoken when her own friends asked after Elsie.

She poked at the tulips, which kept flopping tiresomely. Perhaps it wasn’t the vase that was the problem.

There’d been so little choice for any girl after the War.

‘Soon I’ll only know people who are dead,’ the poor girl had said.

They’d known the telegram would come, of course, all their friends had lost sons. Telling Elsie John was missing had been an agony in itself. Waiting and waiting to tell her, until the friend who was visiting had left, then bracing for the moment when understanding would wipe the light out of Elsie’s face.

Carrie’s throat tightened again at the memory.

Without John, they’d fallen into a silence that they didn’t know how to break. The house was still too dispiriting for a young person. Even the little under-housemaids refused to stay. ‘Too desolate’ according to the last one.

The flowers would have to do, it was only the Flemings. Raising the vase in both hands, to keep the improved arrangement steady, she continued into the dining room and set it down.

On the sideboard in its silver frame stood a photograph of John in uniform, cap at an angle, small new moustache. Just as she’d seen him for the last time. Twenty years ago, almost. Her glance lingered, dangerously.

She could still be overcome by that paralysing mood of the first months after he went missing, a sense that she was only miming, that none of her actions had any force behind. Then determination to find the facts, to discover anything at all about what happened to him, had taken over.

From the very start Rud only kept the enquiries going for her sake. He’d never believed there was the slightest chance. She’d raged when she realised that. If they gave up hoping it would be letting John go.

She drew out her cambric handkerchief and passed it gently over the glass covered face.

While she still lived here in Bateman’s, he wasn’t utterly lost to her. She could conjure him among the early mists, a boy urging his dog away from the ditches beyond the lawns.

Brother and sister were pacing the grey-flagged terrace, out in the sunshine, lifting their faces now and then to the drifting scent of lilac. Mike, the black Aberdeen terrier playfully nipping at their heels, begged in vain for a walk.

‘Later, old chap, I promise,’ Rud bent to look into his eyes.

‘Did I tell you, Ruddy dear, that I’d been back in touch with my old beau Ian Hamilton?’ He was her beau really, or would have been, if only that Muir girl had not come between them. ‘What a year that was, ’86, I had my choice of offers from the peerage, you know.’

‘You’ve kept your looks, Trix, my dear. I’d never put you down as sixty-four. More of a dishonest forty.’ Beneath the hedge of his eyebrows, Rud’s eyes were dancing with the old mischief.

‘Isn’t this the terrace you call the quarter-deck? That is so like you, so amusing.’

In answer, Rud drew her arm through his.

‘There’s a fine show of blossom on our little crab apple over in the orchard. It’s one I planted myself, come and see.’

They were standing together gazing up into a canopy of crimson, when Rud clapped his hand down on hers where it lay on his arm and exclaimed,

‘What does this remind you of, Trix?’

‘With you under the table. The red covering,’ she flashed.

Gazing back at him, Trix could tell that she had made him happy. He was the same dear boy. Yet it made her sad, to see him so altered, so thin and worn in the face. As for Carrie, the word ‘stout’ did not begin to do her solid figure justice. Trix smoothed the becoming ‘old rose’ of her well-fitted skirt over her own neat hips.

‘Not much,’ he’d responded when she asked whether he was any better. Having all his teeth out was meant to put an end to his stomach trouble. It must be almost twenty years that he’d been suffering these fearful bouts of pain. The operations. The diets – he’d eaten only plain boiled potatoes at lunch. Poor darling. Carrie’d said it all began just when John was killed.

Useless doctors, the whole tribe of them. But that was one of the things she wasn’t allowed to say.

Her last nurse, Mrs. Turney, had been very firm. ‘No, really dear, I wouldn’t go saying that to people, not if I were you.’

And old Turney’s advice, which put the lid on many topics, had been good. It had worked. Jack had agreed that she was well enough to join him in Edinburgh. Granted, he still threatened to leave her from time to time. But better their fights than those miserable years spent wandering between watering-places in the company of nurses. Fifteen years of that and she was prepared to hold her tongue.

What was he saying?

‘We’ve had all our fruit trees treated against twig blight.’

She smiled back.

But she still knew what she really believed. Rud and Carrie had cheated her, they’d carried off treasures from The Gables when her back was turned. He must have destroyed Father’s will in that bonfire. She’d never had her fair share. Why, the Bokhara rug in the hall here at Bateman’s came from Tisbury.

Her fingers twitched against the rough tweed of his arm.

Rud himself was gazing again into the tent of blossom, lost in thought.

‘On the day I put this tree into the earth, John held it for me to shovel soil round it.’

Squeezing his arm was all she could manage.

He burst out, ‘I used to think I’d spend the rest of my life here in this house but I don’t care where I live now.’

‘What, “go sannyasin”, take your advanced age as a cue to become a mendicant, like some ancient Hindu?’

But he wasn’t laughing.

In half an hour they’d be gone. Trix had gone in ‘to powder her nose’. Rather than risk having to face time with Fleming, Rud was strolling round by the place where they buried their dogs. One sadness he could just about cope with.

Talking to Trix had stirred things up. Here, away from India, there was no form for expressing humility, for stepping aside from the world and the life one had lived in it. He’d gone as far as he could when he published those Epitaphs of the War. Written in his own heart’s blood:

‘If any question why we died

Tell them, because our fathers lied.’

There it was, out on the page, but to what avail? No-one seemed to recognise just how much he was admitting, how much his interpretation, his understanding had fallen short. Publishing that did nothing to mitigate his sense of shame. He had failed to grasp something larger, something had escaped him, though he was blowed if he could unravel the business now.

Keep walking. That’s the way.

Carrie, bless her, tried to bring him comfort.

‘Whose voice has been more truthful, more honest?’ she always asked.

The left shoe seemed to be pinching a bit. Ignore.

From the first she swore that she would never blame him about John.

‘How can we keep our son when everyone else is sending their own boys off to war?’ had been her line all through.

She was right, of course. She was right. And John himself was wild to get to the Front. But they weren’t taking men with weak eyesight like John’s at that point in the war. If he hadn’t known Bobs, if he hadn’t been in a position to pull strings and get John in, would he be alive now?

No good, he must have picked up a bit of gravel from the path. Taking the shoe off, he shook it then laced it up again.

Time to turn back.

He’d never wanted to imagine Josephine growing older. With John it was different. He’d have been getting on for thirty-five now. Astonishing to envisage that boy careering about the lanes in his little Singer as a solid citizen. John, with his father’s own taste for the low world of music-hall. Thirty-five and a father? There might have been grandchildren…

Oh no, not back into that groove again.

There they all were, out by the magnolia, waiting for him. He must pay attention to Trix. She’d be off any moment, back to London, after that to Edinburgh. How she stood life up there with the weather, let alone in the company of Jack Fleming, he’d never know.

Husband and wife stood together outside the gate, to wave the Flemings off to their train. In the hired car, Colonel Fleming inclined his head while Trix fluttered gloved fingers as she left her brother’s company, all unwitting, for the last time.

‘Dear Love,’ Rud was speaking, his hand on Carrie’s shoulder, as they turned back to the old house together, ‘we’ve not done so badly, you and I.’

* * *

The dim January day left Westminster Abbey in near darkness. Elsie at her side, George Bambridge behind, Carrie was led to her place under the lantern of the great cathedral church. Above her, the roof soared into impenetrable dusk. Seated, she stared out at the platform of dark wood, surrounded by six tall candles. They pooled the area with soft light. Everything ready, set up for Rud, to receive him.

But not Rud. His ashes.

They were to lie by those of Hardy and Dickens. He was being taken away from her all over again.

Through her heavy veil, she looked steadily ahead, ignoring the twinges in her hips. Aware that Elsie was glancing at her anxiously, she straightened her shoulders. This was not the time to give way.

She’d managed to appear composed in the photographs taken as she left the Middlesex Hospital the morning after he died. There was no privacy for them of course. The papers carried all the details: at first the haemorrhage, the burst ulcer, the emergency operation. Later, the daily bulletins of rallying and relapse, the weakening heart. Just as with Rud’s pneumonia in New York, long ago.

But this time he was seventy years old. She could only hold his hand and wait for an end they both knew was coming.

As his grip relaxed, ‘I’m sorry. I am a bit tired,’ he’d whispered.

Carrie closed her eyes, not to see that sunken face.

The organ’s groan came to a stop. Everyone stood. In the silence, treble voices rose from the approaching choir. She turned, as Rud had turned to her when she came up the aisle towards him for their wedding.

The gold cross of the Abbey. The choir. Slowly the eight distinguished pall-bearers advanced at last. A spasm in her throat as the hidden body, all that was left of it, neared. A white marble urn, under that Union Jack.

Resistance stirred in her, it was absurd. A procession. A show. He’d have hated it. But there was no avoiding prominence, since he wanted to be a guide, a voice of truth for the world.

And the King had heard him. ‘The late King,’ she corrected herself.

‘The King has gone and taken his trumpeter with him,’ the papers said. As though he’d been a kind of Poet Laureate. Yet he’d turned the post down when it was offered.

And what did they know or understand of the friendship between those two men? All his life Rud could talk to anyone. The King knew that when he got Rud to write the speech for that first Christmas broadcast.

At the memory her lips trembled, Rud had wept, that afternoon, hearing the King speak the words he’d chosen for him.

They were lifting the flag away, ready to move across to Poets’ Corner for the interment. Now she could see it, the urn she’d chosen for him, white marble to hold him. At last it hit her. She would have to go away, leave him behind in this cold, dark place. In spite of all her resolve, her shoulders rose in sobs she could no longer master.