1982 - An Ice-Cream War (33 page)

But Felix soon began to chafe under the restraints that living at Stackpole imposed. He began to introduce the idea of getting away for a day or two, just to be ‘free’ and ‘natural’ together for a span of longer than a couple of hours. Besides, he reminded her, the new term was starting at Oxford in a matter of weeks. The summer was nearly over.

And so the plan had evolved with a mysterious momentum of its own. Felix was to go to London, ostensibly to visit Holland. Charis would go to Bristol to spend a few days with her aunt. On her way back she would stop at a small hotel that Felix knew in Aylesbury. He would meet her there. Under the guise of husband and wife they would spend a weekend at the hotel. Then Charis would return home. Felix would go back to Holland’s for another brief visit. His return to Stackpole would occur some days after Charis’s to allay all possible suspicions.

The plotting and the anticipation, Charis had to admit, had been exciting. No reference was made to what would happen that weekend in Aylesbury.

Charis dressed slowly. She felt unusually agitated and troubled. This was their second visit to the King’s Arms in Aylesbury, a pre-Christmas visit to Aunt Bedelia coinciding with the end of the Michaelmas term in Oxford. A shaft of unkind watery sun shone through the windows on to the crumpled bed. Felix seemed more sure of himself and composed this visit. Certainly, the pleasure had been more acute…She held her hand out in front of her and watched it tremble. By contrast, her nerve was going alarmingly fast, she felt. The same questions rose inexorably up in her mind. How was it, when she loved Gabriel so, that she could become the mistress of his brother? The same answer came as inexorably in return. She had not been driven to anything, she was not under compulsion, she could exercise her free will. Somewhere inside her, somewhere bidden, she must have
wanted
it to happen.

It was this thought that made her miserable. She felt confused and baffled. For a second she experienced a shocking sensation of leaping, jostling panic in her chest. Was this true guilt? she asked herself. Were these the symptoms? Trembling hands and breathless turmoil? But it wasn’t so much ‘guilt’ that she was feeling as a kind of fear. She felt dazzled and giddy from the pressures she was under. She went over to the bed, and pulled back the blankets and looked at the still damp stains on the sheets. But it was so nice to be loved, she told herself, to be held by someone, not to sleep alone all the time. She needed that.

Feeling slightly stronger, she went downstairs to the hotel dining room. It was a cheerless room at the best of tunes, walls a pale mustard yellow with waist-high wooden panelling. It was almost empty at this early hour; apart from Felix there were only two other guests at breakfast. Commercial travellers, she thought, by the look of them. One sleepy waitress was on duty.

“Hello,” Felix said as Charis sat down. “Everything fine?”

She smiled. In public he lost some of his assurance, became more boyish and anxious. “Of course.” She reached out and patted his hand in what she imagined as a wifely way.

Felix was eating a kipper. She poured herself a cup of tea and watched him finish it. He had his spectacles on, the better to fillet the fish, she supposed. He wore a tweed suit. He looked older with his glasses on, certainly old enough to be her husband. But she needn’t worry, she told herself, no one at the hotel had ever seemed remotely suspicious.

“Sure you won’t have something?”

She shook her head. He really was so different from Gabriel. Thin-faced where Gabriel was broad, dark not fair. He had none of Gabriel’s unreflecting, stolid contentment. Felix seemed always bothered with life, suspicious of the cards it was dealing him, always weighing things up and criticizing. In many ways he was rather a ruthless person, she thought, but not in the ways
he
imagined he was. A good person to have a love affair with, she concluded, a little ruthlessly herself. At least one person should be impatient with moral conventions, have no time for social norms, be able to scoff at the predictable judgements of conscience.

Felix put his knife and fork together. “What time’s our train?” he asked.

“A quarter past eight.”

He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I suppose we should be getting along to the station.”

The London train was running late. Charis and Felix stood on the deserted platform and watched the thin sleet fall on the railway lines. Behind them the waiting room windows were fogged with condensation.

“I don’t mind if it’s cold,” Charis said, rubbing her gloved hands together. “It’s when it’s cold
and
wet that I can’t stand it.”

Felix nodded gloomily, and stamped his feet to restore the circulation.

“Cheer up,” Charis said. “I know the weekend’s over but you are going to be home for six weeks.”

“I know,” Felix said. “But it’s not the same. Christmas last year was bloody. Now what with Nigel and Eustacia too, I…oh, I don’t know.”

Charis slipped her arm through his. After all, they were husband and wife until Marylebone.

“But it’ll be different this year,” she said. “Last year we weren’t together.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Felix agreed. “It’s not just this filthy weather. Oxford’s ghastly these days. It’s empty. Or rather the colleges are full of soldiers. Drilling in the parks, nurses wheeling wounded men about in the college gardens. OTC this, yeomanry that. And this wretched war going on and on.” He looked down at his feet. “Philip’s changed too. He’s talking about joining an ambulance unit in France. He wants me to come too. Something he read in Nietzsche, about subjecting the soul to all possible torments.” He gave a wry smile. “I read Nietzsche
last
year. Philip dismissed him: ‘a salon philosopher’. I ask you. And the train’s late.”

Charis laughed and squeezed his arm. “Oh, gloomy old thing. Don’t worry, it’ll be spring before you know it. And this war won’t go on for ever—”

She wished she hadn’t said that. She knew that the thought of the war meant only one thing to both of them. Gabriel’s return. Sometimes she forced herself to think about what would happen when peace arrived and Gabriel came back. Her mind acknowledged the broad truths: that he
would
come back, that he would be ill or maimed, that he may be changed in some way. But it refused to go into details, details such as how it would be possible for life to return to normal.

When the train arrived, they managed to find an empty compartment at the front. Felix sat with his back to the engine, Charis sat opposite him. The train chuffed off. Felix opened a newspaper. Charis watched the passing countryside, the mesmeric peak, trough, peak, trough of the telephone wires, and tried to tangle and lose her thoughts in the rhythmic clatter and rumble of the wheels on the railway lines. But gradually she felt her early morning panic return. She picked a thread loose from a seam on her glove. The end of the war. It seemed an appalling nemesis, not a moment for rejoicing. How could she live with both Gabriel and Felix at Stackpole? She knew instinctively and confidently that this current state of affairs would never have arisen if Gabriel had been present. Felix had once implied as much to her, joking that in the beginning he had resented her for stealing Gabriel’s affections away. Felix would have to leave, that was all there was for it, she told herself, conscious of the note of hysteria. She could never dissemble in front of Gabriel. Something would happen; he would know, she’d be sure to give herself away. She felt her mouth go dry, heard her pulse resounding in her head.

Felix put down his newspaper and took off his glasses and leant forward to take her gloved hands. Charis smiled at him, his serious face, the pink marks on his nose where his spectacles had rested. She felt a love for Felix, of a different order from the one she felt for Gabriel. It was a kind of gratitude, really. A gratitude for showing her alternatives. In his own very different way, she thought, he is just as strong a person as Gabriel.

“Charis,” Felix said, staring at their linked hands. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Ask away.”

“About. About Gabriel.”

It was as if the train was suddenly speeding along the edge of a precipice. She felt the sucking, empty feeling inside her that happened when a motor car went too fast over a humpbacked bridge.

Felix glanced at her face, then looked back at the hands. Then he took his hands away and rubbed his forehead.

“I get these terrible dreams, you see,” he said, screwing up his eyes. “About Gabriel. Nothing threatening. No…no accusations. It’s as if everything is normal. Like we were before the war. We’re just doing things together. Ordinary things. In a very normal, natural way. Quite happy too, in an unreflecting way. And then when I wake up, you see, I feel terrible. I feel this awful—I feel I’m…
wrong
. That I’m disgusting and corrupt.” He looked out of the window, but carried on speaking. “I know I
shouldn’t
feel this. I know I’m not ashamed about us.” He paused. “But then I think: what if Charis feels this? What if
she’s
tormented too? And I’m somehow forcing her? You see, if I felt that was true, then I don’t think I could somehow go on. That it would be terribly wrong to carry on.”

He looked back at her for an instant. “I need to know how you feel, I think. I think that’s what I’m saying.”

Charis forced herself to reach forward and take his hands. Tons of evasions seemed to sit on her shoulders. Through the shrill ringing noise in her ears she heard her calm, reassuring voice saying, “I think about it too, Felix. Dear Felix. But Gabriel’s not here, that’s the difference. He’s away. He doesn’t know what’s happening. He never will. We’ll never hurt him. He’s not a part of our world. It’s only because he’s away that our own world came into existence, that we created our world.” She checked herself momentarily: she was beginning to babble. “Our love,” she said slowly, “is a separate thing. It’s not,” she, improvised wildly, “it’s not part of the world we knew before the war. It’s on its own. Enclosed. Quite distinct.”

She saw his features relax. She’d said enough. A deep, infinite sense of disappointment gripped her like clinging ivy. “Don’t worry any more Felix, darling. I don’t worry, I don’t even think about it.” Fleets of regrets hemmed her in.

He was smiling. “Thank you,” he said. He leant forward and kissed her gently on the lips.

11 March 1916,
Salaita Hill, British East Africa

On the twelfth of February 1916 the British Army in East Africa finally opened their offensive against the Germans. Temple watched two thousand brawny South Africans assault the gentle slopes of Salaita hill after a four-hour artillery barrage. He sensed the depression and disconsolate moods of the last eighteen months lift miraculously from him as the innocuous hill was pounded with high explosives. He felt sure he’d be at Smithville within a matter of days. The South African troops had loudly vowed to sort out any ‘bleddy kaffirs’ they found that happened not to have been blown apart. Two hours later six hundred of them were dead as they ran away from the withering fire coming from German trenches.

On the twenty-first of February the German Army of the Western Front—in a completely unconnected response—attacked Verdun, thereby initiating a four-month siege.

Temple only had to wait three weeks until a second attempt on Salaita was made, but he found the delay cruelly frustrating, nonetheless. In the interim the British Army was presented with a new commander-in-chief in the shape of General Smuts. Smuts modified the British tactics. Headlong attacks were to be abandoned. The advance on Taveta and the German border was to be co-ordinated with a series of flanking movements through the foothills of Kilimanjaro as well as the previously planned drive from the north under General Stewart. The Germans would be trapped in a pincer at Moshi, their escape routes down the Northern Railway cut off.

But this time Temple found his mood alternating between elation and scepticism. Staff officer friends of Wheech-Browning told him that the war would be over in a few weeks. The possibilities of returning to the farm provided many hours of enjoyable speculation. But whenever Temple looked at the rag-bag army that was meant to bring this about, at the vain and bickering generals, his innate pragmatism would advise him not to raise his hopes too high.

So on the ninth of March Salaita was attacked again and found to be deserted, the Germans having stolen away in the night. Two days later Temple rode his mule down the main street of Taveta, back in the familiar little township after an absence of eighteen months. Thus far everything had been achieved without too much difficulty (the six hundred dead South Africans excepted), the Germans content to pull back without offering a fight whenever it looked as if the forces massed against them were overwhelmingly superior. But up ahead lay the Taveta gap and the twin hills of Latema and Reata. Temple rode out of Taveta to scout them for the KAR who were due to be involved in the first attack. At the foot of the hills the ground was thick with a dense, shoulder-high thorn scrub which seemed to continue all the way up to the top. Temple dismounted and moved a few yards into the scrub. Soon he could see nothing, not even the summit of the hill he was meant to be climbing and upon which the Germans were well entrenched.

He reported as much to his battalion commander, Colonel Youell, a brave weather-beaten man who felt he’d been personally let down by the Germans’ refusal to contest Salaita hill. Temple said that it was his considered opinion that the two hills would be extremely difficult to take without massive casualties; that it would be a good idea to wait until the thinking movement made its way round Kilimanjaro, at which point the Germans, seeing the danger of being cut off, would surely yield their ground.

Youell ignored him. “It may sound sensible to you, Smith, but with respect it’s obvious that you’re not a professional soldier. We don’t want them to fall back. We must force von Lettow to stand and fight. We’ve got to engage him here precisely so that he doesn’t realize he’s being cut off until it’s too late.”