Heart of War (71 page)

‘About the same as Louise does,' Cate replied. ‘The English countryman is a tolerant person. He's had a lot of practice at it. They've all known John a long time and they don't think he's suddenly become a Hun because he's joined the peace movement. Mostly they don't agree with him, either.'

‘Not even the Englands there, with one son gone and the other likely to at any moment, if they start another Somme battle?'

‘Especially not them, or those like them … Hullo, Probyn, any news from Fletcher?'

‘Never heard of him,' the wizened figure in the deerstalker hat said, stopping and touching his forelock.

Cate slowed down – ‘I know what his new name is … What's his news?'

‘Lots of shelling … thinks the generals are going to start another big battle any moment now … and they're going to make a regular mess of it, like always … They've made him a sniper and he's killed a lot of Germans. Mostly officers, but he's afraid he killed one poet … just felt it was …'

‘Has he sent you any poems from the Front?'

Gorse shook his head – ‘Gives 'em to a captain … he was in this captain's company afore they made him battalion sniper. The captain sends them to some bloke in London, an editor, like, who prints books.'

‘A publisher,' Cate said. ‘That sounds hopeful. Fletcher will be famous yet, Probyn. How's Mrs Gorse?'

‘Got a bellyache, Squire. She'll be all right tomorrow … Has Garrod found another girl to take Hilda's place?'

Cate shook his head – ‘We're not trying to, Probyn. We're all right as we are. Hilda's in Coventry, working in an aeroplane engine factory. She wrote to Tillie.'

‘Flighty, that's what she is,' Probyn grumbled. He moved on, with another touch of his hand to his cap.

Old Commander Quigley passed, peering shortsightedly. ‘Oh, hello, Christopher … and Mrs Kramer, isn't it? The lady from Yankeeland. Our ally at last.' He cackled heartily. Isabel Kramer moved easily round Christopher. The old
Commander liked to pinch ladies' behinds. ‘The Huns keep sinking ships with their damned submarines,' Quigley said. ‘Swine – lurking under water like sharks. We'll get 'em, though … drown the whole lot of them.'

‘We'd better,' Cate said. ‘The figures of tonnage sunk are alarming.'

‘But improving, improving!' the Commander croaked.

Cate and Isabel moved on. A voice called – ‘Christopher … Squire!' Cate stopped, turning. It was the rector, stocky, upright, white haired, seventy-seven years old – ‘How's that boy of yours? In France, isn't he?'

‘Yes,' Christopher said. ‘To his hearty relief. They had kept him back in the Depot partly because he was still rather young and partly because he seemed to have developed quite a knack for teaching the recruits shooting and patrolling. He's stalked birds with his binoculars all his life, so I expect that was it.'

‘But he didn't shoot the birds,' Isabel said in a low voice.

The rector said, ‘I expect they all find it a bit different out in France … You know, last time he was down here, he came to see me?'

‘I didn't know,' Cate said.

‘Well, he came and talked to me … said he might like to come into the Church after the war. Had he ever mentioned that to you?'

‘A long time ago,' Cate said slowly. ‘Before Christmas, 1915, when he was home from Charterhouse. I told him that his great-great-great-grandfather had been squarson.'

The rector said, ‘It would be wonderful if he could follow me … He'll have to hurry, though. Kimball's told me I'll kill myself if I go on hunting, and I know I'll die if I don't – not that the hunting's been even fair, these past two years … It was good to see you at evensong,' he said to Isabel.

‘Thank you, Rector. You have such a lovely church … and we all have so much to pray for.'

Cate said, ‘We'd better be moving on, Rector. I have to put Mrs Kramer on the train.'

The rector toddled on. Isabel said, ‘Laurence might want to leave Walstone, you know.' Cate thought, Laurence not want to live in Walstone? What would happen to the Manor? Isabel said, ‘It is a possiblity, Christopher. In fact, Laurence may be thinking of joining the Church
in order
to get away.'

Cate said, ‘I can't believe it. Surely, when he comes back, out of the trenches, he'll want to come home. This will seem like … what it is … his place, his land … Walstone.'

Isabel said, ‘It's possible that these things, this portion, which to you are just love, are oppressive responsibilities to him.'

The Manor trap rattled past, the new girl who had replaced the stable boy at the reins. She raised her whip in salute as she passed, then the gold glow of the twin lamps receded in the twilight and Isabel said, ‘Let's not talk about that any more. We have so little time … We'd better go to the station now, dearest.'

They turned down the lane that led to the railway station. Others were going the same way – soldiers down from Hedlington returning to barracks, relatives returning to London … Sunday evening, young summer, the Weald of Kent. The trap was standing in the station yard, the horse tethered to the rail at the far end.

‘She must have taken my suitcase onto the platform,' Isabel said.

They walked through the little booking office and onto the platform. The rails reflected red light from the up starter signal, the heavy trees lined the open trench of the railway, the evening was hushed and still. They saw the girl with the suitcase, talking to a pair of soldiers, but walked past her, silent, to the end of the platform. There, under the white glow cast down from the open underside of the up home signal, she turned and whispered, ‘Darling – how long, how long?'

‘I don't know,' he muttered.

‘My body yearns for you … I'm parched.'

‘I could come up to London … or Liverpool again.'

She touched his hand with hers – ‘It isn't enough, dearest. I want peace, a place … my place, beside you.'

‘You know it can't be, yet.'

She dropped her hand, and tears glistened in her eyes. The stationmaster, Frank Miller, bustled by on his way back from some distant errand, and said, ‘Evening, Mr Cate … evening, Mrs Kramer – going back to London now?'

‘I'm afraid so.'

Cate said, ‘Any news from the boys, Frank?'

‘They're all right, sir … they
was
all right, middle of May. That's the last letter we had … sort of postcard, really, from
Alf, with printed words like “I am well,” “I am sick,” “I have been wounded,” “Hoping this finds you as it leaves me”; and then you cross out words, like. Those boys never was much of a hand at writing, especially Gerald. Miss Morelock used to say they'd best go into some job where they could shout, instead of writing … Mister Laurence well, sir?'

‘As far as I know.'

The signal above them dropped with a metallic clang. From the east, an engine whistled high and long out of the dusk; a barn owl swooped across the rails and vanished silently into the woods opposite.

The lovers walked back down the platform to where the stable girl waited with Isabel's suitcase.

Rachel Cowan let herself into the little house near eleven o'clock. It was dark but not dense, impenetrable dark – it never was, in England, in June, for the sun was never far below the horizon. Bert was in the front room, where the new printing press had been installed, smaller and older than the first, and liable to frequent breakdowns. He was drinking ale from a bottle, and there was a newspaper thrown on the floor beside him.

He said, ‘I thought you was supposed to be home by tea time.'

Rachel said, ‘I'm sorry, Bert. We got to talking.' She didn't want to upset him; she didn't want to tell him what she had been doing, either. It would be a sort of desecration.

‘Talking about what?' he asked, raising the bottle to his lips.

‘The peace movement, of course,' she said. ‘Ways to make the government come out in the open … more places where we can employ passive resistance without hurting ordinary people.'

That was true, as far as it went. The meeting had again been held in Bertrand Russell's rooms. Russell had been there, again with the beautiful young Lady Constance Malleson.

And Wilfred Bentley had been present, the red spots obvious on his cheeks, coughing thinly, holding a handkerchief to his mouth, dabbing his forehead, but the smile always there, the eyes steady, the spirit unbroken, hatred for no one … if there were more Christians like him, she might become one herself.

She said, ‘Bertrand Russell congratulated us on getting out of prison, and said we really ought to be congratulated just as much for going in.'

‘Can't see
him
going to prison,' Bert said. ‘Too bloody aristocratic for that.'

‘He'd go,' she said indignantly. ‘You know he would. He's not afraid of them. John Rowland was there … Naomi's going to France soon, he told me, and he's expecting his son, Boy, home on leave soon … Wilfred Bentley was there, and…'

Bert said, ‘He's always there, always talking.'

‘He's going to become a socialist soon,' she said. ‘He says he's learning more with us, at these meetings, about the true state of society in this country, than he had learned at Winchester and Balliol, and in all his years before – he's twenty-seven.'

Bert said, ‘So you just sat on your arses talking from eleven in the morning to seven, eight, nine at night, eh?'

It was just as she had feared. Bert was laying philistine hands on a wonderful experience. The meeting had ended at two in the afternoon, and Wilfred Bentley then asked her to share a late lunch with him. After hesitation – she should get back to Hedlington, her work, Bert – she had agreed. They had eaten in a little restaurant near the south end of Bloomsbury Street. They talked, before, during, and after the meal. Then they walked to and into Regent's Park … she had found herself listening as though to two other people – a short dark Jewish woman with short legs, her East End accent only half blanketed by two years of Girton, and a tall young country gentleman and officer, fair haired, unfailingly gentle and polite, with the quiet, confident accents of Winchester and what regiment did he say? Some number, it was. (He had said very earnestly, ‘You are making a mistake to attack the Army as such, Rachel. All of us are proud of our regiments. The 60th has given me something nothing can take away, not even death. We all feel the same. Many of us are disillusioned about the war, even about England, and think peace ought to be, and can be made … but we're proud of our service, our comradeship in the Regiment.')

‘'Ave a beer,' Bert said.

‘No, thank you. I'm not thirsty.'

Bert drank, looking at her over the rim of his glass. She ought to tell him what she had been doing – walking, talking, discussing, listening; but he would say that it was a waste of time. They ought to go out and shoot a peeler, he'd say. And she'd have to tell him she'd been with Wilfred … through the
afternoon, in a taxi to the West End, through the evening, dining at some expensive restaurant, strange foods she had never known … ‘Profiteers' Heaven, this place,' he had whispered in her ear. What did he see in her? It was just their shared commitment to the cause. Waiting, standing close, at the farthest end of the platform on the Chatham side of Victoria, too? And the kiss under the signal light, the sudden flooding passion making her knees shake, the aching loss of goodbye – these, too?

Bert said, ‘I can see you had a good time, love. Wish I could …' he shook his head,' … but I'm not cut out for that sitting round, talking, talking … Oh, those people are all right, an' they've got guts, but they don't understand me, and I don't understand them. We don't speak the same language, see? … I won't be going to the meetings any more, I'll …'

‘Oh, Bert,' she cried, stricken.

‘I'll work with you here,' he said, ‘but my place is in the factories, at the union office. I s'pose we're both fighting the same war, but you and your lot will be in the headquarters and offices … I'll be in the trenches.'

Susan Rowland hurried out of the drawing room in the middle of a sentence and from the foot of the stairs shouted, ‘Sally! Tim! Come downstairs this minute!' She waited until the two faces appeared at the banister above her. Both dirty, she noted, though it was barely half an hour since she had personally supervised them washing themselves.

‘Come down,' she commanded. ‘What were you doing to make such a noise?'

They shuffled down toward her, Sally whining, ‘Only playing with the toys in the day nursery, Mummy.'

‘You must have been throwing them at the wall and then jumping on them,' she said severely. ‘I can't think how you haven't awakened Dicky. Now run and play outside, it's a lovely day.'

They sidled past her and out of the front door. She returned to the drawing room, where Mrs Baker waited patiently, notebook and pencil in hand, standing by the open window. She said, ‘They'll wear you out, m'm. It's a wonder you don't get a nanny. Of course, they don't mean any harm, but they'll wear you out, just the same.'

Susan wondered if it was true that the children didn't
mean her any harm. Raising those two to be ladies and gentlemen in these times was not easy. Sometimes she felt a glow of real warmth coming from them, toward her or Richard, even toward the staff – particularly Mrs Baker … then they would do something despicable, mean … and she would again be convinced, as Richard was all the time, that their interest was always selfish. They only liked Mrs Baker, he said, because she was the cook.

She said now, ‘You know I think a mother ought to raise her children herself, Mrs Baker, if she is able to. I only wish I could feed Dicky.'