The Wild Dark Flowers (17 page)

It was a clay road: that was all he could think for what seemed like hours on end. It was only a few minutes, probably only a few seconds. But it seemed so much longer. He hadn’t realized that the battered surface of the road wasn’t stone but slicked clay, and now it lay in ridges and clumps. While his back had been turned, some almighty hand had rippled the road and thrown parts of it in every direction. And there was a crater exactly where his squad had been waiting.

Men were running around pulling at other men lying on the ground. He heard the sergeant shouting orders. Harrison’s legs carried him forward, but some disassociated part of his brain was running backwards, back the way he had come, back past Gore and Givenchy, back all the way to Boulogne.

He got to the shell crater. The lieutenant was dead, that was obvious: he stared down at a crumpled body, the face turned to the ground. Harrison looked down objectively; his heart had slowed from its first initial shock and was now sluggishly thudding. The noises around him were unnaturally clear: crystal clear in the morning air after the dazzling crash of the shells. He could swear that he could hear blackbirds singing somewhere close, and he started to laugh at the absurdity of it.

He felt a slamming blow on his arm, and turned his head and saw the sergeant, spattered with blood but apparently unhurt, glaring at him. “What you laughing at?” he demanded. “Get these men off the road and move on. Form up with the other squad.”

Harrison looked left and right. There seemed to be half a dozen injured: and there on the grassy verge was Nat—sitting propped up, huffing and puffing, his eyes widened, one hand to his chest.

“Nat,” he said. “You all right?”

Nat was trying to say something; then he stopped, and infinitesimally shook his head as if the effort were too much.

“We’d best be going,” Harrison told him.

The sergeant was still yelling. Harrison looked away, up the road at the milling panic, and at one or two of the men who were being pushed ahead. Half turning back, Harrison held out his hand. “Grab a hold,” he told Nat. “On your feet.”

There was no reply, and he turned full face to his friend. Nat was absolutely still. His gasping for air had stopped. In fact, for Nat, everything on earth had stopped. Harrison leaned down until he was level with Nat’s face. The man’s eyes were open, and there was a faint remnant of Nat’s perpetual smile. “Nat,” he murmured. “Nat, mate . . .”

“Get moving!” the sergeant roared suddenly at his side.

“He was . . .” Harrison began, and stopped. He was suddenly fearful that he would scream, or sob. Something dreadful, something horrible. Curse or cry, like a child.

The sergeant grabbed his arm and hauled him almost off his feet. “Move, now!”

Harrison dragged his gaze away from Nat and ran up to the next squad, and they started marching. He didn’t look back.

One two, one two.

Someone shouted back for a cigarette.

“What was it?” he asked the man next to him.

“What’re you talking about?”

“The bomb . . . the blast. . . .”

“Whizbang,” the other replied. He looked like an old sweat, a regular. “Seventy-seven-millimeter. The crump’s bigger. Five-point-nine inch. You wouldn’t know about that one. None of us would.”

“Seventy-seven-millimeter,” Harrison repeated. “Shit.”

“About right.”

They walked solidly at a hard pace, their feet slipping from time to time on the clay.

As he walked, he thought of songs.

Just songs. Only songs.

He repeated the words to himself and they went around in his head, around and around and around while the sun got hotter and he waited for the next shell to come wailing out of the bright blue sky.

Daisy, Daisy
, he thought.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.

It would come now, or tomorrow, or sometime soon. Or it may not come at all. He might walk through it all singing songs in his head. He might be here in a week, or gone in an hour.

He set his face and trudged forward.

Give me your answer, do.

*   *   *

I
n the house in Grosvenor Square, Octavia was awake.

She felt very much at home here in London, far more so than she really felt in Rutherford. Soon after they had been married, William had taken full advantage of the fortune that Octavia brought with her, and rebuilt Rutherford Park. His design had been quite set in his own mind, and he had barely consulted her about the alterations to the fifteenth-century house—he seemed to think that, coming from trade, she would have no inkling what a grand home should look like—but, here in London, he had graciously allowed her a freer rein.

She sat in the deeply upholstered wing chair in her bedroom now, gazing out through the open curtains at the London square in the first light of dawn, and smiled wryly to herself. It had often crossed her mind what her father might have said to the spending of the inheritance on Rutherford; he had certainly been no shrinking violet, and she could easily imagine both William and her father coming to blows—beneath their dignity as it would have been, of course, but nevertheless—in the vast Tudor hall of Rutherford. Her father liked all things new, and abhorred what he called “the rotting mansions of the titled few.”

It gave her a nice sense of satisfaction to know that her bullying father’s money had been poured into such a rotting mansion as Rutherford was in 1892. He would have loved the intricacies of the new bathrooms and heating systems, of course, for he loved anything mechanical. But the glasshouses and the library. She shook her head now, her smile fading. What a waste of money he would have thought those to be. A place to grow pineapples, and a place to read. “Damn waste!” he would have blustered, his flabby face mottled with fury. God, she had endured so many of his rages after her mother had died. It was the utmost irony that a man like William—titled, calm, straight-backed, superior—had closed his fist on her father’s millions. She liked that very much indeed.

Rutherford was entirely William’s domain even now. Oh, she had furnished a little and he cared not a jot for the upper floors, where she had secretly given the nursemaid a good bed, and the children, when babies, lavish cots and carpets and playthings; but the public places—the halls, dining room, morning room, music room—all those kind of spaces were determined to William’s taste.

But Grosvenor Square more accurately reflected her. She had made it more modern, refusing the heavy damasks and brocades of William’s generation. She had employed artists to fashion the Art Nouveau stairway and beautiful furniture of the black-and-white tiled hall; she had commissioned an Oriental room, superbly done with canary yellow silk wallpaper, and every chair upholstered with a peacock’s tail flowing over the seats.

Her taste in art was everywhere; William had tolerated the two small Monets and a rather larger Renoir, but disapproved of the Cubist drawing by some dangerous Spanish upstart called Picasso, and he had finally drawn the line at her prospective purchase of a Gustav Klimt. “The man is a pornographer,” he had opined when Octavia had mentioned how much she admired his paintings. “I think he’s terribly fine,” she had objected. “What about
The Kiss
, don’t you like it? Everyone raves about it.” William had shaken his head. “Too glittery by far, too fussy.” But Octavia had also seen
Judith with the Head of Holofernes,
and it had stuck in her memory. She thought perhaps it was the expression of triumph on Judith’s face that so stirred her, the luxuriant smile of power.

How often she herself has wished for a little power, how often in what seemed like a very long marriage. But at least here, in London, something of herself was reflected in the house. And she would see that the housing for the millworkers in Blessington was changed. That would happen. Whatever William said—and he had mentioned the word “socialism” rather darkly when the subject had last come up, hinting that this was a trend equivalent to some mudslide into the end of civilization—she would make it so. She would write a letter today in fact, asking what progress the manager had made since her last visit.

She sighed, and looked at her bedside clock. Five thirty.

Where was Harry now, she wondered? Surely in Boulogne, in the hospital. Perhaps today they would get him onto a ship and bring him home. Unconsciously, she wrung her hands in her lap. It was desperate to be so much in the dark. Every time that she thought of Harry injured, she felt sick to her stomach. Even when he was a baby, the slightest fall or cut had the capacity to make her feel faint. He had once cut his lip while trying to climb a gate, and she had found—to her surprise, actually—that the world swam in front of her eyes.

How useless she would be in the heat of a true emergency! Perhaps it was easier faced with wounded men en masse, a group of strangers—perhaps one wouldn’t feel one’s heart turn over, one’s pulse stagger. So many very well-brought-up girls were now becoming VADs, but Octavia felt that she would be unequal to the task. If she fainted at the sight of a cut lip, what earthly use would she be in a hospital ward? And yet she must, she absolutely must, brace herself for seeing Harry. For dressing his wounds, too. She was his mother, after all. It was her duty.

She wondered what else she could do. She had thought a lot about it since seeing the Kents on that dreadful day. Rupert was lost, but there were so many others coming back who would never again lead a normal life. For all she knew—and she put her hand to her throat at this choking thought—Harry might be one of them. What if Harry could never again manage to keep steady, let alone marry or keep Rutherford? What treatment could be given, what shelter offered? In addition to writing the letter, she decided, she would talk to Florence de Ray about this hospital in Regent’s Park where the girl was working. She could offer money, perhaps, if it would be accepted.

The whole subject was so fraught, so confusing. France was only a few miles across the Channel, and yet it might as well be a whole world away. Despite William’s visit to Herbert de Ray yesterday afternoon, there was very little information. It was “war-classified.” How men loved to pretend to importance with such phrases, she thought. “War-classified” and “need-to-know basis” and all such other perfect rot. As if she would run into the street and proclaim any news to a random passerby! What arrant, strutting nonsense.

The world was at the mercy of men, and that was the entire problem. Although she had never said a word to William about it, Octavia agreed with the suffragette cause in that if nothing else. Men were far too fond of their little pieces of territory—their fences, their boundaries, their rules. One day, perhaps in the not-so-distant future, such boundaries might be washed away by the common man and woman. Wealth and power might pass to tradespeople completely. The titled classes might become mere footnotes in history. William, of course, would snort at the prospect. But she thought it entirely possible.

How she would have loved to march into Herbert de Ray’s office in Whitehall and demand to know what was really happening in France. She had come, lately, not to believe what was being written in the newspapers. She had shown the
Times
to William last evening. “It says here that there was a jolly good showing at Aubers Ridge,” she said, incredulous.

“If it says it, it must be so,” William had replied.

She had frowned at him. “I cannot believe that you would be so gullible.”

“I am not gullible,” he replied calmly. “But there must be a picture of success projected.”

“Even if it is a lie?”

“The
Times
would not perpetrate a lie,” he said.

“But William, it is rumored that we have lost thousands and thousands of men so far, and the French far more. They say we are entrenched. I mean, literally. As in a stalemate.” She pointed to the newspaper article. “This is mere drivel, isn’t it? This jingoistic talk of bashing the Hun.”

He had raised an eyebrow. “
Bashing
?” he repeated with pointed sarcasm. “Not a word I would use.”

And that was the end of the subject. She had used an inappropriate phrase, a slang word, and her husband seemingly took this as evidence that a sane conversation could not be conducted with her. He got to his feet, smiled indulgently, and rang for his brandy and cigar.

She had looked at him and wondered if he really believed what he was saying, or if he felt an obligation to be blindly supportive of the French and English leadership in France. “They are old men!” she felt like screaming. But of course it could not be said, especially in front of the servants. Everything was marvelous, everything was a success. The Hun were being given a good hiding. She had screwed the newspaper into a ball with frustration and flung it aside, while William watched her with a deeply perplexed expression of dismay.

She shivered now, not from cold but from helplessness. She got to her feet. When she thought of her conversations with William, she felt increasingly as though she must break away. How she would love a little room of her own, an apartment somewhere, a place of refuge. She fantasized that it might be high up in some anonymous place, just a little room or two up a narrow stair, where she might be nobody, with no name, no position, and no responsibility.

And yet it was a selfish longing. That she was Lady Cavendish she could not avoid; she could not be nameless, nor alone. But God in heaven, how she wished for it: that same breaking free impulse she had felt last year with John, when the idea of fleeing to America had seemed, for a few brief shining days, entirely possible.
You can walk barefoot on the sand all you like,
he had promised her as he talked about the Cape Cod house he had planned.
You can walk all the way around the bay. Alone, if you like, or together. Whatever you want. . . .
John had understood.
You want your freedom, don’t you?
he had asked her.
To find out who Octavia might be.
And she had answered,
yes
. But that was before Louisa, before Harry’s injury, before the war. Before, before . . .