The First of July (10 page)

He thought of Wilding. This time tomorrow, Britain would be at war, there was no doubt of it, and he would be at his father’s graveside in what was, now, his estate.
The old order changeth
, he thought. How dreadfully and appropriately inauspicious the timing was.

He and Marina went to Regent Street, to buy her a black dress, gloves, and hat. London was crowded, more so than he remembered. As Marina looked at black gloves, he tried to grasp the fact that this was for a funeral, his father’s funeral. That the handsome, charismatic man who, even unseen, had such a hold on his imagination was now gone forever. He would never be seen again; he was sealed in his coffin, he was history. He found his emotions changing swiftly from sadness to disbelief to humor. On the streets, with the shops draped in Union Jacks and some of the women wearing red, blue, and white cockades on their hats, it felt more as if a vast summer fête was in progress.

From the moment they had woken up on the day of the funeral, he thought that he should simply take Marina’s hand in his and tell her everything. A greater catastrophe waited if he did not. Yet, hours later, they had passed through the town nearest to his estate and still he had said nothing. Instead he tried to reassure himself. Isabelle was now the dowager, but, as he had no intention of taking on the house and would return to New York as soon as was decent, much of his life could continue unchanged. Surely it could.

Finally, there was Abbotsgate, appearing far more quickly than it should have. The car was running up the drive, and there on the steps were Hopkins the butler and Mrs. Fawkes the housekeeper.

The hired chauffeur stepped out, opened the door, and, just as he had known he would, Hopkins stepped forward and said, “Sir Henry, Lady Sydenham. Welcome home, sir. We are all so sorry that it is in such very sad circumstances, sir.”

Just as he’d known she would, Marina shot him a look of bewilderment, shock, and deep hurt. For a second she stood stock-still, staring at him as if he were a complete and unwelcome stranger. Which, he supposed, he now was. As they moved side by side into the house, he touched her arm, but she made no response.

His stepmother was there in the cool of the Great Hall, and beside her Edward, smiling tentatively. Behind them was a portrait of his father in hunting pink.

“Isabelle,” Harry said, first shaking her hand and then kissing her awkwardly. In her black dress, her skin was almost colorless. Inevitably she looked much older than he remembered her, though still beautiful.

She attempted a smile as she stepped forward and then said “We’re so very glad you’re home.” Then, blinking, on the edge of tears, “I’m so terribly sorry. We had no warning—he had complained of indigestion but no more,” as if she had failed in a responsibility to look after his father.

Edward looked anxiously from her to Harry.

“This is Teddy,” she said, just as Harry said “This is my wife Marina.” It was as if both women, both once his, were strangers, not just to each other, but to him.

Marina and Isabelle shook hands. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Marina said, her accent so American and her smile so kind. She turned to Teddy. “My, aren’t you the image of your brother. I don’t have a brother myself, so I’m very glad indeed to find I have a brother-in-law.” Teddy shook her hand, apparently both curious and delighted. He looked lively despite his mother’s distress and the loss of his father.

They were shown to their room, large and overlooking the park, by a young maid. Marina had behaved perfectly: friendly, sympathetic, and dignified; but once the door shut, she turned away from him and moved to the window, not speaking.

“Marina… .” He had had no idea how to begin to deal with the situation he had known from the minute he had opened the letter. He had known this would happen from the first time he realized he wanted to marry her, at the Aquarium, and yet he had failed to tell her anything about his background except in generalities, which he could never have gotten away with had she been an Englishwoman.

“So how many other lies have you told me?” She spoke in a cooler tone than he’d ever heard from her, although with a tremor that belied her external self-control.

“Not lies—”

“Oh, Harry, I had expected more of you. Lies, omissions, convenient forgetfulness. What else will I find out about my marriage and my husband if I wait long enough?”

“I just didn’t want—”

She was staring at him, fierce and unreachable. “I don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t know why you abandoned these perfectly nice people—because clearly that’s what you did. Maybe your relationship with your father was difficult. It often works out like that. Maybe you just didn’t want to deal with it. But it feels as if you just wanted the easy life. You thought you could come to America with your mother’s money, leave any responsibilities behind you, marry an American wife, young enough, knowing nothing about your country home, to accept your vague accounts of your childhood and. . . .” Her thoughts echoed his, but she was shaking her head in disbelief. “One thing is certain. We can never tell my father. He admires you, trusts you, and you lied to him in circumstances where he might have expected total honesty.”

“No, that’s not how it was—” he began, but it hit him that it was almost entirely how it was. “I’m sorry,” he said. How inadequate.

After a very long silence, she said, politely, as if to a stranger, “And your brother—”

“Half-brother—”

“Your
half
-brother,” she repeated sarcastically, “he’s, what, eleven years old?”

“Twelve.”

“He’s twelve years old,” she said, nodding to herself. “He doesn’t have any other brothers and sisters, I assume?”

Harry shook his head.

“So you abandoned him too? He can’t know why you vanished out of his life,” she said, sounding less angry now, more sad and perplexed. “Maybe he had a hard time with your father too. If he was a difficult man, maybe a big brother would have helped him.”

“It wasn’t that,” Harry interrupted. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Well, what was it like,
Sir
Henry? Or can I expect that if we go through hard times, you’ll run away from me too? Perhaps it’s a habit. . . .”

She was close to tears. He desperately wanted to hold her and tell it was all right. But it wasn’t.

“I don’t want to cry,” she said. “It’s not my day for crying. It’s your father’s funeral, and the tears must be your stepmother’s and Edward’s. I don’t want to look as if I’ve been weeping. But later I need to know. I’m a city girl. If you have some plan of coming back here to be a squire on a horse with yellow teeth with peasants doffing their hats, I need to be told. I liked being Mrs. Harry Sydenham. I don’t at all want to be Lady Sydenham.”

“Marina—” he said and then stopped. In New York society, most girls would fall all over themselves to gain an English title, and here was Marina, furious at finding herself the wife of a baronet.

“I do so love you,” he said.

“Then give me the truth,” she said. “Later, after the funeral. Never, ever lie to me again.”

Benedict, London,
August 1914

B
ENEDICT TRIED TO CONCENTRATE ON
The Times
and put everything else out of his mind on the journey home; he was exhausted by his own emotions. Sun shone through the smeared windows of the train and fine silvery dust was suspended in the light. Theo sat, his eyes on his book,
The Riddle of the Sands
, which he’d been enthusing about on their journey up. Benedict noticed how rarely he turned a page and how hot and uncomfortable he looked. In Gloucester, Theo appeared worldly; but in London he had at first seemed younger, excitable yet out of his depth, and then, since the disastrous expedition to Regent Street, subdued to the point of disconnection. He was, Benedict was certain, horribly humiliated by what had occurred, and he wondered which of them most wished it had not.

But where Theo had given in to a moment of temptation, a moment where his longing and his impulsive nature had come together and brought him close to disaster, Benedict was preoccupied with his own, impossibly inaccessible, much more terrible desires. In London he had seen a life of opportunity, of risk. At any point, in a matter of minutes, he thought, he could have vanished out of sight, become a different man. By day he had dwelled on the music and the secret of senses without boundaries, which he was increasingly sure the Russian composer understood perfectly. By night he lay in bed and remembered the youths he had seen hovering about Piccadilly Circus and the man, that man, on the bus.

The newspaper he’d bought at Paddington was a special edition. Things were moving so fast on the Continent that the news was already out of date. Tomorrow, the next day, or next week, they would be at war. He glanced up and the outskirts of London were just the same: small lives, shabby houses, little businesses: the foundations of an empire. He looked down at the tall dark headlines that threatened it all. The printers’ ink stained his damp hands.

Theo threw his book aside.

“Look, we’re carrying on as if I was a chancer who’d stolen a kiss and you were a well-mannered and very chaste maiden.” He was speaking fast as he sometimes did when he was drunk, although he was sober now.

Benedict began to protest but Theo went on determinedly. “I am sorry. I am truly sorry and embarrassed and anything else you want me to be. Perhaps I’m just a bad character, but I can’t bear any more of this politeness. I mean, we’re chums. We’ve each been all the other’s had in the face of the sheer ghastliness of choir practice and lunchtime recitals and endless pernickety exercises. Of living in Gloucester forever.”

Benedict found himself halfway to a smile. “Actually, I wasn’t thinking about anything much.”

Theo was running his long fingers through his hair. The sun was in his eyes and he crinkled them against the light. Benedict stood up and pulled the blind halfway down.

“It’s all right. It really is all right,” he said. “Of course we’re friends. You made a mistake—”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Theo said. “You know it wasn’t a mistake. I’m a thief. A failed thief. If you’re my friend, then that’s the sort of friend you’ve got. And now I’m at your mercy—my reputation, in Gloucester at least, is in your hands.”

Benedict inhaled deeply. Sat back. Looked at Theo, uncertain whether he was sincere or acting, whether he was on the edge of tears or laughter, and wanting, more than anything, to take Theo in his arms. To make it all right. To bury his face in that tawny hair and breathe in the smell of Theo. Just to run a finger along the curve of Theo’s mouth: the line that separated the rough afternoon stubble from the softest skin of Theo’s lips. To peel a lip back and touch the blunt edge of his lower teeth. To feel what he could see daily. He couldn’t allow himself to think further. There was a sort of terror in imagining even this much, and an even greater terror that one day he might respond to the dreadful hunger in himself.

“And
you’ve
got a friend who spends his days being something he’s not,” he said. “Who isn’t sure there’s a God. No, who’s damn sure there isn’t, yet who sits at an organ playing psalms and hymns, knowing his closest friend is infinitely, unimaginably better at playing the organ than he’ll ever be.”

Theo’s face lit up. “Two days in London, one mad Russian,” he said, “and you’re a changed man.”

The train shuddered over two sets of points. Theo gazed out of the window. He was like quicksilver, Benedict thought, his attention and ideas always changing shape and direction, his enthusiasms contagious. His hands lay limply on his lap, the book flat, the bony knuckles on boyish, long fingers that were capable of creating such beauty, the nails a little grubby.

“Are you going to get engaged to Agnes?” he said, more to focus his own thoughts.

Theo looked amused and rueful. “I think so. Though not yet. Soon. I mean, to be honest, I think I’ve rushed things a bit. It was a sort of joke, but Agnes doesn’t really understand jokes and her mother certainly doesn’t.” He sat back again, sticking his legs out so his calf almost touched Benedict’s. “I can’t afford a ring and I haven’t said to a word to Father. Mind you, a bishop’s daughter—he’d not be likely to be against it. Might even give me some money. Or one of my poor mama’s rings. If he hasn’t given them to my various prospective new mamas.”

“When are you going to tell him?”

“She’s pretty enough, don’t you think?” Theo went on as if he hadn’t heard.

“She’s very pretty. You’re a lucky man.” He wondered if Theo had ever spoken to Agnes about his plan.

“Don’t laugh at me, Ben. I know you’re a better man than me. But actually I’m beginning to think I just can’t face another two years of Gloucester. I used to dream, sometimes, of signing on as crew down at the docks. Letting my lily-white hands grow gnarled and brown. Sail away to the South Sea Islands.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide, is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied,
and all that.” He looked down at his hands. “But most of the boats were going to Liverpool. The longest journey was only taking pig iron to Antwerp. I could deny that quite easily.”

He picked up his book again and opened it unconvincingly. He looked up almost immediately and, as he sat forward, as if about to admit Benedict to a great secret, finally their legs touched and Benedict could feel the warmth of Theo’s through his trousers.

Theo’s eyes were very slightly narrowed and the air of restlessness became one of suppressed excitement.

“But now, you see, I’ve got an idea. Things are changing. Every day. We’re at war, or as good as. I don’t want to miss out.”

He eyed Benedict as if to gauge how his speech was being received.

“I like the organ, strange beast that it is, I like the music when I’m allowed to play anything halfway decent, but sometimes I feel like an old man sitting there. In ten or twenty years’ time, my life would be just the same—thud, thud, thud, cold, stiff fingers on Christmas Day, slippery and sweating in July, except with Agnes grown stout and a brood of squealing infants we couldn’t afford. As soon as we’re at war, I’d rather join up, rather be part of it than spend decades with Stainer or banging out
Ur-bide with Meeee
.”

“Your father—”

“My father. My father—if I took a commission, I wouldn’t be in thrall to my father. I’d be paid as a subaltern.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I am. You can’t think of one thing against it.”

“Actually, I can. Though I can see what you’re saying. But who says any regiment will take you?”

“
Us
, Benedict,” he said, and his smile was so transparent, so hopeful, that Benedict was silenced, in anger and excitement. How dare Theo think that he, Benedict, would go to war just because he asked? How dare he?

And yet. And yet.