Heart of War (49 page)

So here it came, just as he thought it would and just as that German writer had said it should a few weeks ago. Cate wondered whether the death of the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph last month, after a reign of sixty-eight years, had helped or hindered the proposal. The old man was generally believed to have worked toward moderating the extreme – sometimes hysterical – positions and pronunciamientos of the Kaiser; so he would probably have been a supporter of the peace initiative. His death had put his grand-nephew Charles on the thrones of the Dual Monarchy, and however strong a personality he might be – personally, Cate knew nothing about him – it would take him months or years to attain a stature where he could exert much influence on Potsdam. It was also clear that the British Government, indeed all the Entente Powers, were going to regard the German proposal with as much caution as though it were a delicately fused bomb.

Garrod came in and said, ‘More coffee, sir?'

He shook his head. ‘No, thanks. I've finished.' He stood up, folding the paper. Garrod said, ‘Begging your pardon, sir, Hilda and Tillie say they want a whole day off every week.'

Cate thought, why is she asking me? But of course Margaret wasn't here … These domestic problems had been put to him for many, many months now, but still he could not get used to them. He said, ‘With only me here, I should think that would be all right, wouldn't it?'

Garrod sniffed. She herself had never had even half a day off for the first twenty years of her service. She said, ‘For the same wages, sir?'

Cate said, ‘Oh, yes … You know, if we don't give them that, we'll lose them both to the factories.'

Garrod said, ‘We don't need them both, really, sir.'

Cate said, ‘I suppose not, but Tillie's been with us a good many years now, and Hilda, well, I feel she's too young to go out into the world alone.'

‘She's twenty, sir.'

‘Good heavens, I suppose she is. She was only fifteen when she came to work here … I can't believe it was five years ago – before the war.'

‘Yes, sir … Jill's had her puppies, sir, in the kitchen, if you want to see them.'

Cate said, ‘Of course.' He followed Garrod along the passage to the kitchen, to find the other two maids crouched beside the dog basket in a corner, with Jack, the male blue roan cocker spaniel, standing to one side looking nonchalant, while Jill lay on her side in the basket, seven tiny blind puppies crawling over her belly seeking her dugs.

Cate looked at the puppies, then at the bitch, who hung her head; then at Garrod, then at Jack. Garrod shook her head discreetly. Jack had good reason to look nonchalant: he had clearly had nothing to do with the puppies' conception. ‘Naughty girl,' Cate said softly, wagging a finger. The maids giggled.

Guy Rowland sat with his mother in the drawing room of their big Hedlington flat. ‘You saw Virginia,' she asked listlessly. ‘How was she?'

‘Great,' Guy said. ‘They let me take her out in work hours. She's loving it all, Mummy.'

‘I suppose their officers, or supervisors, or whatever they call them, at least, are ladies?'

‘I believe so, but Virginia doesn't want to become one, though they've suggested it to her.'

His mother nodded and looked back into the fire. Guy wondered what she did with herself. With no husband or children at home, housekeeping could not take up much time, especially as she still had Mrs Orr and Ivy, though Ivy was now married – to a soldier in France. She didn't knit, or sew, or paint, just sat, walked, shopped, but everything listlessly.

He said, ‘I've seen Daddy once since Granny's funeral. I took a day off and went up the line and spent the day with his battalion. Old Sulphuric likes us to do that. He was looking well then, though I don't understand how anyone can stick it there for …'

She interrupted, ‘Why would he do it to me? Why?'

Guy said cautiously, ‘Who, Mummy? Do what?'

‘Archie … I told you last Christmas I was in love with another man and was going to leave Daddy – we have had no real marriage for years, nothing in common. I've been very unhappy, you know that.'

‘Yes, Mummy.'

‘Then, when you'd left for the R.F.C., I went up to his flat, and he'd gone – vanished … I guessed he'd got drunk and joined up. I thought it would be in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders – he
is
a Campbell. I telephoned their depot, but got no satisfactory answer.' She stared into the fire. ‘I waited, waited, dying …
why
would he not write, at least? Then one day in May I saw him, here in Hedlington. He was walking
down High Street, near the South Eastern, in the uniform of a 2nd Lieutenant of the Wealds!'

Guy dared not look at his mother. His father's adjutant was an older man called Archie Campbell, who told him he had been a painter. He must be the man who had been his mother's lover …

She said, ‘When he got a commission he could have applied for any of the Highland regiments. In this war, even the Camerons would have taken him. He
must
have applied for the Wealds. It's too much of a coincidence otherwise, with sixty regiments to choose from, not to mention the gunners, sappers, A.S.C. … And now he's Quentin's adjutant! His closest, personal staff officer!'

‘He can't have applied for that,' Guy said. ‘Daddy must have chosen him.'

She said, ‘I don't understand any of it … I don't understand men. And the war's made them all worse, stranger.'

Guy said cautiously, ‘Do you think Daddy knows, or suspects, that he's, the man you wanted to go away to?'

She shook her head, ‘I never told Quentin his name … If he's killed, he'll come back to me …'

Guy thought, she means, if Daddy is killed; but what if Campbell is the one who is killed?

It came out of the clouds seven thousand feet above Peronne … biplane, two struts each side, big white numeral 16 painted on the fuselage, body green with patches of brown … camouflage paint … yellow wing tips outside the black, cross, spinner and wheels painted yellow … an Albatros D II – Werner von Rackow. A trail of black smoke spiralling down the sky behind him marked the funeral course of Guy's last opponent, another D II … A learner pilot? No, a woman … a girl! He'd killed a girl, blown her head in two with the stream of his machine gun bullets from a hundred feet above and behind … Crash! Flames spreading like red blossom down there, like a cancer, over the trenches, the towns, the railway lines, in the fleeting winter sun … heavy shells rumbling by …von Rackow was circling wide, closing in, but still out of range. He waited. The Pup only had one gun but it could turn inside a D II … The hairs on his neck crept and he kicked the Pup into a tight climbing turn. A stream of tracer bullets passed close over his head, and into the fabric of the wings.

Two D IIs streaked by below and disappeared into the vast silence, no sound of his own engine, von Rackow had turned sharply and was coming at him, guns flickering. Guy swung inside, tight, tighter, the blood pounding in his head… the D II was sliding into his sights now … now! His thumb closed on the button …

His scream still echoed in the room. Sweat was running down his face, and his pyjamas were soaked. It was dark. He switched on the light and went out. His mother was in the passage, her hands to her cheeks – ‘Guy, darling! What's… ?'

‘I'm all right, Mummy,' he said, and went into the drawing room, took a bottle of brandy out of the sideboard and drank deep direct from the bottle, then went back to bed, past his mother, and waited, a long time, for sleep to come.

Guy sat in Probyn Gorse's cottage while the old man mended rabbit nets at the table and the Woman washed and gutted a rabbit in the sink. ‘Don't know what's going to happen to us all, the way things are going,' Probyn growled. ‘Squire's had to sell Lower Bohun, so now Shearer don't own it any more than he did before, nor does Squire – the bank does.'

‘Why did Uncle Christopher have to sell?' Guy asked.

‘Get more cash, to keep up the other farms, pay taxes … Shearer's going to have to cut down half his hops … and he'll be paying the bank more interest on the loan and mortgage than he was paying rent to Squire. What's wrong with being a tenant, tell me that!'

Guy drank some of the beer he had brought from Walstone's smaller pub, the Goat & Compasses, as he passed, riding a hired motor cycle. He said, ‘Well, the, ah, game preservation must be going well.'

‘Naow! Too easy!' Probyn snorted. ‘Rabbits swarming, 'cos there's a shortage of cartridges … gamekeepers gone off to the Army …' He glanced up, ‘What are you now, Mister Guy? Captain? Major?'

Guy laughed, ‘A plain lieutenant.'

‘See any pheasants out there?'

Guy nodded, ‘Plenty, but they're very wary with all the noise. The earth rumbles and the trees shake and they don't understand it … How's Florinda? That's her stage name, isn't it? Just “Florinda”?'

‘Dunno. Ain't seen her for two, three months.'

‘Does she write?'

‘No. She'll come down one day and tell me what she's been up to.'

‘Fletcher?'

‘In the barracks, down there. Only he's called Whitman now. Don't know when he'll be going to France, but he's rare fed up with them barracks, I can tell you that.'

‘Have you had any more contacts with Lord Swanwick, or his pheasants?'

Probyn put down the net and looked at Guy. He said earnestly, ‘Lord Swanwick's fallen on hard times, Mr Guy. His keepers have all gone now, all the old ones. He has one man, don't know a pheasant from a badger, and afraid to go out at night in case he catches cold … the birds are going to be very poor next year, 'cos no one knows how to look after them … Lord Swanwick's trying to pretend everything's the same – inviting lords and ladies down for a shoot every other weekend … still Master of the Hounds, but they're no better than a pack of mongrels now … farmers shooting foxes in front of his eyes … I'm right sorry for him … 'cos it ain't his fault, see? Things are changing too fast … too fast for him and too fast for me. I don't like to see women working the ploughs, that I don't. Or driving the bakers' vans … brewers' drays, even … taking tickets at the station … and the noise, aeroplanes, motor cars stinking the roads, and frightening the cows out of their milk … and sometimes, the earth shaking
…the earth
!'

Guy said nothing for a long while, then he said, ‘Let's hope it's over soon, Probyn.'

He rode the motor cycle to the front door, swung round with a jab of the brake, and stopped in a sideswiping shower of gravel. The door opened and a disapproving old housemaid appeared, saying sharply, ‘Now, young man …'

A small figure with thick glasses and a jutting thatch of grey eyebrows pushed past her, his hand out – ‘I never thought I'd welcome the sound of one of those infernal machines …'

‘It's a…' Guy began.

Rudyard Kipling raised a hand, ‘It's a Triumph Model H – the military model – 550 c.c., three-speed Sturmey Archer gearbox, side valve, belt driven, of course … What's that leather cylinder on the rear mudguard?'

‘There's a spare driving belt in it, sir. The Royal Engineers said they had to have it for their despatch riders.'

‘Well, come on in, my boy. I know you have to go after lunch, so we mustn't waste time. Let's have a look at you … lieutenant … D.S.O. … M.C., those wings look good … Your father must be so proud of you. I suppose he's out there?'

‘Yes, sir.'

Guy followed Kipling into Bateman's, the famous author's refuge from fame and, since September 1915, from the world. At the end of that month, in the Battle of Loos, Ensign John Kipling of the Irish Guards, a contemporary and friend of Guy's at Wellington, and just past his eighteenth birthday, had been posted as ‘missing believed killed'; nothing more had been heard of him. He was Rudyard and Carrie Kipling's only son.

Then Kipling took him into the book-lined, paper-strewn study and said, ‘Tell me, Guy … I've been out there, of course, but I am still far from understanding, it, as I felt the North West Frontier, and somehow I must learn what John learned. He could have told me.'

‘He could have tried, sir,' Guy said slowly. ‘But I don't know whether he or I or anyone else can succeed.'

Kipling reached out with both hands, ‘Try, my boy, try … Dear God, I must understand, somehow.'

Guy sat by the fire in his Uncle Tom's flat, thinking. He had had a good breakfast and Jones had just gone; but he had not slept well. Things he had seen haunted him – barefooted, hungry children begging in Piccadilly; and the faces of women mobbing him outside the stage door of His Majesty's, because he was a hero of the R.F.C. They were hungry, not loving … He remembered Florinda Gorse, when he was ten; she'd loved him, and showed it in those big green eyes … He might go down to Aldershot later this morning, and take Virginia out again. She'd probably be excused duty because of his wings and the ribbon of the D.S.O. That ribbon would accomplish wonders, as he had been finding out ever since he left the squadron.

And from Aldershot he could go over to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and get some mysterious tool that Frank wanted – swore he would never be able to tune the
engine of the Pup properly without it … Well, how did the other riggers tune theirs then?

Frank had said earnestly, ‘Ah, they're tuned all right for
them
, Mr Guy … as well as they can be without the micrometer … but not well enough for you.'

He'd laughed, glad that the C.O. hadn't heard that. Major Sugden, like the R.F.C. in general, did not believe in the star or ace system: and nor did Guy … But he was having phenomenal luck; already there was only one pilot in the squadron with more kills. The Germans knew it, and recognized him as an ace, even if the R.F.C., Sulphuric Sugden, and Guy himself refused to.