Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
‘No. No, thank you. I’ve had a very good lunch.’
After that exchange Kit appeared to forget she was there, and gazed out over a sea heaving with white crests. Matty looked down at the deck, at her feet braced against the swell. Someone had dropped a raisin scone, and it lay squashed into a heap of black and white crumbs. Anger at Kit’s indifference stirred life into Matty, and her skinny demon knocked in her chest. She tugged at Kit’s sleeve.
‘There is something I would like to ask you,’ she blurted out, but half her words were lost. Kit cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Something I would like to ask you,’ she shouted into the wind.
‘Yes,’ he said, tight-lipped.
Matty was almost deterred by his stony expression, but her anger was growing. Go on, it urged.
Propelled by its force, Matty began again. ‘I wondered...’ The spectre of Emma Goldman filled her vision with a grand and daring dream. Matty ground out between set teeth: ‘I think you should marry me.’
The ensuing furore was astonished, furious, bitchy and sometimes deeply critical.
Flora took one disbelieving look at her brother as they drove from Farnham station to Nether Hinton and burst into tears. ‘But Matty hates horses, Kit. Can’t bear them. She told me. They give her nightmares. You can’t marry her.’
‘Flora!’ In the half limbo that overtakes someone who has leapt over the edge, Kit was irritated by Flora’s distress. ‘That’s the least of my worries.’
‘Kit... why on earth?’ Flora blew her nose hard and tried to concentrate on something neutral. The car drove on through fields with crops stooked in matronly rows, and the countryside displayed itself in a palette of English colours, grey-blue, green and post-harvest gold. Flora delved into her scanty resources for the right comparison. ‘It’s the money, isn’t it, Kit? Matty’s like those poor women in Africa being sold off for their nose rings or neck shackles. The house
isn’t
worth that.’ She pulled hard on the hanging strap and looked straight ahead. ‘Not for someone like her.’
‘Why not for Matty?’
‘She’s — she’s not your type, Kit. Anyway, everyone knows you love Daisy and you don’t love Matty, and you should love the person you marry.’
Quite right, thought Kit. Experience had taught him otherwise and he was touched by his sister’s defence of romantic love. ‘Even so, I can’t go back on my word now,’ he said.
‘Of course you can. It’s not too late yet.’ She blew her nose again and stuffed the handkerchief into her handbag. ‘Why on earth did you suggest it in the first place?’
Kit considered telling the truth – that Matty had caught him when alcohol, remorse, anger and jealousy had reduced him to the lowest point, when one course of action seemed as good as another and, for once, he had acted without thinking. Then, there was the truth (admittedly crude) that Matty had money, which she was offering him in bucketloads – and the whole bloody mess was about money. A business deal, if you like, she had pointed out, pale under the mosquito ravages. You need money, I have it.
What do
you
want? he had asked. And she had told him. I want a home. A place where I can be myself. You have that.
She had stepped back, rocking with the swell on her absurd high heels, and named the sum that she was worth. It was, she added, perfectly possible to live in mutual harmony if both parties agreed to be honest. Kit thought he caught a flicker of anger in the brown eyes, and missed the desperation.
‘Yes,’ he said, his hangover obscuring the sensible answer, ‘yes. I accept.’
How straightforward it had been, he thought from his limbo. How uncomplicated and undeceitful. No disappointments, no betrayals. Simply a market transaction struck over Deck 4. The wind blew Matty’s hair into chaos and she gave up trying to keep her hat anchored onto her head. Otherwise, braced against the ship’s roll, mouth clamped shut, she remained quite still until he was forced to ask her if she would mind leaving him alone.
‘
Why
did you do it, Kit?’ Flora was hurt and puzzled.
Whatever the nature of the bargain, Kit knew one thing: since he had chosen to say yes Matty was owed loyalty. ‘Matty is all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’ He tucked his arm into Flora’s. ‘I rely on your support, Flora.’ Flora refused to look at him.
‘Promise me,’ he said. ‘No scenes. No regrets. Just your backing.’
‘I suppose everything must change.’ Flora hated change and distrusted it.
Perhaps she and Matty would be friends, share confidences and trust each other. Perhaps not. In her heart Flora considered Matty feeble.
Tyson slowed the car, turned into Croft Lane and drove past the church. Flora looked out of the window towards Dick’s Wood: Rob Frost’s team had been at work and now they were resting in their shaft harness and harrumphing into nosebags. Rob and his horses were rarely apart, and he sat smoking on a sack a few feet away, dressed, as always, in his father’s working suit and puttees, from the war, which he could not be persuaded to abandon.
They were home. Kit’s drawn, troubled face made Flora feel guilty and she pulled herself together. ‘I promise, Kit, no scenes.’
The house was as they had left it, only the impressions were sharper for having been away – woodsmoke, polish and damp. After the brilliance of France, it was familiar yet different: dark, muted, composed of greys, dull whites, deep greens, browns. Flora sniffed and smiled.
‘Hallo, Robbie,’ she said to the figure waiting at the bottom of the steps.
Tanned from a fortnight in Brighton and even heavier around the waist from stout and fish and chip suppers on the seafront, Robbie had been idle quite long enough in her opinion. She surged forward, large and snapping with energy.
‘How’s my special girl?’ Flora managed a smile and Robbie did not notice how fixed it was. ‘Well, I must say I don’t think the postman had much to do while you were away. Only two postcards from France.’ Flora persevered with her smile. ‘But, then, I’m sure there was far too much to do to think about me, and here I was worrying that you were well and looking after yourselves.’ Robbie patted the silk on Flora’s shoulders. ‘Very nice, dear, but rather Frenchy for home. I think abroad has suited you, although you’re a bit peaky.’ To Kit she said, ‘Looks a bit as if
you
have been overdoing it, Mr Kit.’
Planted in front of the empty fireplace, Rupert waited for his children in the drawing room and smoked a pipe. Last time he had been in France...
... August 1914.
It was chaos. The Central Co-ordinating Committee’s
War Book
in Whitehall ran to several million words and covered every move, problem, question, and library book borrowed by a would-be soldier. In the first two weeks of the war those regulations had called for 120,000 horses: trams yielded up their heavy chargers, farmers their work-horses, gentlemen their thoroughbreds, and a kicking, shuddering force was urged up the gangways into waiting ships.
With them went 80,000 men, 80,000 rifles, bandoliers and iron rations. Stores, forage, field-guns, shells and munitions. 80,000 hearts beating with a mixture of apprehension, jingoism, a let’s-get-at-’em and an idea that the war ahead would act like Condy’s fluid on latrines — disinfectant to wash away the indulgences of Edwardian England.
How the horses screamed when the cranes grappled the slings around their bodies, how they died of terror and vertigo in the holds, how they quivered on the cobbled quayside at Boulogne. How their grooms sweated and vomited down in the rolling holds. One of them, Eric Danfer, was past it by the time they got to Boulogne, the first casualty of the war.
‘Sir,’ asked a new recruit, Danny Ovens by name, ‘what do I do with Danfer?’
Rupert cast his eyes over the bodies hanging out of windows, up lamp-posts, crowding the hill behind the town and saw, pinpointed among the tricolours, two plain black habits.
‘Give him to the nuns,’ he said, in the clipped manner that hid his nerves.
The camp was four miles away from the town. The march took them through choked streets and up a steep hill to the heights overlooking the sea. It would be some time before the officers’ horses were unloaded – though the transport officer was doing his best – and Major Sir Rupert Dysart tramped with his men over cobblestones in the blazing heat.
When darkness fell over the untidy canvas village and the paymaster had refused to exchange any more pennies for francs, a smell of blancoed webbing, hot men and beer assaulted the nose. Civilians from the town walked up to the encampment to watch. Since many of them were women, the sounds of laughter and flesh-on-flesh came from the shadows and the few private corners.
One of the ladies, with large eyes and frizzed hair, accosted Rupert as he strolled along the cliff top. She was older than her sisters, but fresh, appealing, willing. She had light brown hair between her legs and under her arms, strong thighs and a handsome bosom under her cotton basque. Afterwards, Rupert lay beside her, grateful and satiated, for it had been two years since Hesther had permitted him her bed.
Rupert stayed with her for a long time that evening, concentrating on being alive, on breathing, on feeling army serge rub against his skin, her flesh under his lips. He forgot that he, too, was older than most of his brother officers and that he had left behind a house, children and a wife who did not love him and whom he had grown to dislike...
‘Here are our travellers,’ said Robbie, advancing through the door and manoeuvring herself directly into Rupert’s line of vision. ‘All travel-stained, so mind you don’t keep them too long, sir. They need to wash.’
Autumn sun slanted in through windows and exposed bare patches on the carpet, but the room seemed chilly and Flora shivered.
‘Sherry?’ Rupert asked, as if neither had been away. Without waiting for an answer he poured a glass and held it out to Flora. ‘Why are you shivering? Go and put some clothes on if you’re cold.’
When Flora returned in her less sophisticated but more serviceable dinner frock, Rupert and Kit were talking hard. There was more grey in Rupert’s hair than Flora remembered but, then, she never dared look too hard at him. Rupert’s gaze quizzed her. ‘Kit’s told me his news. He doesn’t waste time,’ he said. His tone indicated approval.
In truth Rupert had been taken aback by his son’s announcement but he was not going to waste breath on what, after all, was welcome news. He balanced his whisky glass on his knee and said, ‘I’ll contact my agent and the solicitor at once.’
This was the territory on which Rupert operated. There was no question of asking if Kit was happy, if he loved the girl he was going to marry.
Dinner was conducted in comparative amity and, after Flora had left the men to the port, Rupert shifted his bulk into a comfortable position and lit a cigar.
‘Good foaler, do you think?’ he asked his son, tapping his silver cigarette case.
‘Good Lord, sir. How would I know?’
‘The hips, my boy. Look at them. What do you think you do with horses? You don’t want a pig in the poke. You want value for money. And an heir.’
Kit did not wish to think about Matty’s body. With an effort he recollected her non-existent hips and dismissed their implications. ‘May I remind you, sir, that it’s Matty who has the money. Perhaps she should look carefully at me.’
‘She did, my boy. And she liked what she saw. A house. A title. A good-looking chap with no obvious vices.’
‘Tell me, sir, were you always so cynical?’
The thick fingers clenched for a second and left prints on the polished table. ‘Are you being rude, my boy? Or have you come back Frenchified?’ Rupert’s gaze slid past Kit and rested on a portrait of a long-dead Dysart.
Kit wadded up his napkin and tossed it onto the table. ‘Will you excuse me?’ he said. ‘I’ve got things to do.’
‘Kit!’
Kit paused in the doorway. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s been done before, you know.’
‘Selling oneself for a mess of pottage?’
Rupert gave one of his rare laughs and stubbed out the cigar. ‘Well, I wouldn’t call a quarter of a million pounds that exactly, but, yes, if you like.’
Sleep did not come easily to Kit that night and he drifted in a half world, rocked by boats and trains. A pinpoint of light danced before him, widened, expanded and burst into dazzling circles. Then he was riding in the sun’s clean glare towards the white-out of the horizon. Sweat trickled down his shoulders and under his arms; camel dung tanged in his nostrils and the eyes of Arab boys were dirt-ringed and limpid. Kit rode on, shamefully aroused, pursued by a sense of terrible loss.
You can change your mind before it is too late, Flora had said. But a pebble rolling downhill has a habit of gathering speed. From Kit’s thirty seconds of hesitation in the garden of Villa Lafayette and from an ill-timed hangover, the stone skimmed and bounced along the slope, faster and more purposeful by the moment. Rupert was quick to inform the editor of the social page in
The Times,
where the announcement was read and debated. To withdraw then was to humiliate Matty, and Kit shrank from that. A date was settled, caterers alerted, dressmakers put on overtime. Matty was deluged with congratulations, some genuine, others not.
Oh, yes, it was far too late for Kit to change his mind and, with preparations so far advanced, no honourable man would consider doing so.
‘Good Lord,’ said Polly in her most irritating manner from the depths of an old-fashioned sofa in the morning room of her house at Askew Road, ‘selling yourself to the devil, aren’t you, Kit?’
Polly was pregnant and it made her lethargic. She was unfortunate in that it made her look awful as well, with dispirited ribbons of hair slinking round her head. ‘Well, at least you’ll have money.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Kit was driven to snapping, ‘nobody talks about anything else.’
‘But that’s what it’s about?’ Polly peered at her brother and life came into her face. ‘Isn’t it, Kit? Isn’t that why you’ve done it – because the family is in such a mess?’
Kit silently acknowledged the hit and realized he had yet another problem: defending Matty from gossip. She may have offered herself as a gilt-edged commodity but that did not mean that every matron from Mayfair to Knightsbridge should have a field day over the exact nature of the engaged couple’s relationship.