The First of July (9 page)

Harry, Europe,
July 1914

T
HAT LAST NIGHT IN PARIS,
Harry had sat on the edge of the bed, perhaps for hours, he had no idea, all the time wondering what to say to Marina.

He stood up, paced across the room, parted the heavy curtains, and opened the shutters as quietly as he could. Soon it would be dawn; there was already a greenish light in the east. He looked over the city spread out in front of him. The great dream of lovers. He could see the illuminated Tour Eiffel, the dome of the Sacré Coeur, and the Seine, only just visible between lime trees. The lights of a river boat flickered in and out of sight. There was the faintest of breezes. And his father was dead. Gone. Suddenly, at the age of only fifty-nine. It was thought his heart had given way, the lawyers had told him. They had been trying to contact Harry for some days. He had felt disbelief, then a brief flare of relief, of freedom, followed by deep shame and a greater pain than he might ever have imagined. He had always thought there would be more time.

He must return home. The lawyers had written—and he thought he detected the very faintest note of condemnation—that they awaited his decisions but that if they did not hear from him, the funeral would be held on August 4. He would understand that any greater delay would be distressing for Lady Sydenham.

He jumped as a hand touched his shoulder. It was Marina. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, standing beside him, squeezing his arm.

Then she said “What’s the matter?” and her eyes dropped to the letter still in his hand. “Have you had bad news?”

“Let’s go in.”

And so he had sat her down on a chair, sat opposite her, his knees touching hers and holding her hands.

“I’m dreadfully, dreadfully sorry,” he said, and watched her expression change from concern to alarm.

“I’ve done something unforgivable. I want to ask you to forgive me first and to tell me you love me as I do you, but that’s a coward speaking. I
am
a coward, and I’m not sure you can forgive me.” He was stammering now, and her face showed fear.

“It’s my father,” he said.

“But he’s no longer with us… .” She looked momentarily less worried, but puzzled.

“He is no longer with us. He is dead. Dead now. But he wasn’t dead when I told you he was.”

She drew back very slightly and pulled up her wrap.

“He died a few days ago. Very suddenly. I’m so sorry but, you see, there’d been this misunderstanding. No, this
rift.
With a woman I thought I loved, with my father—and I was too hurt and downright stubborn to make it up.” She bent over and took his hand.

“And I went to America and too much time passed and I lied to your father and then I met you and I wanted to marry you so much but couldn’t explain to you and—” his voice was hoarse.

“Harry,” she said, eventually, and too calmly, though the silence before she reacted seemed an age, “your father’s just died. It’s a shock. For me too. All of it. Come back to bed. Try to rest. We’re both tired. In the morning we’ll set it straight. You, me, everything. It’s not that it’s all right, but we shall have to live with it.”

“I’ll have to go back,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Of course
we
will go back.”

Later, next to her, comforted by her warmth and the familiarity of her, he still couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t even told her that she was now Lady Sydenham. Most of all, he had let the bigger lie go untold. By the morning he’d have to provide some better account of the family split and his flight from England, and he already knew that he would contrive some story that would evade the truth. Finally he allowed himself to think of his father, handsome, hot-tempered, loving, impatient, and permitted the realization of what was lost to squeeze his heart.

On the Saturday morning, he had asked the hotel to send a telegram to his lawyers and Isabelle. It was a fine day, and he persuaded Marina to take an early walk along the river. Things had, understandably, changed. There was nothing he could identify specifically: Marina conversed, was sympathetic, looked beautiful, and was a dutiful companion, a wife any man might envy. But he was not sure that she was any more than that. He could not measure the gap that had opened up between them; it might be merely a crack, or an unbreachable abyss. What had been comfortable silences now seemed pregnant with what was unsaid.

Nearby, a church bell started to chime and then, a few seconds later, two more, slightly farther away. Harry looked at his watch—it must be later than he thought, but it was not time for the marking of the hour. As some larger and more sonorous bells began to toll continuously, he guessed it must be some religious festival. Groups of men and women were gathering outside small shops and near boats. He and Marina were crossing over a bridge when a young workman came running around the corner and cannoned into Marina. She stumbled, put out a hand, and crashed into the side of the stonework. Harry, thinking she’d had her bag stolen, caught the young man and held him back against the side of the bridge. He quickly realized his mistake as the boy, wide-eyed, put up both his hands in entreaty.

“Pardon, m’sieur, madame, pardon… .”

And then, as if to excuse his haste and carelessness, he said in French, “We have mobilized. France has ordered a general mobilization. It is to be war. With the Germans.” And he looked somehow excited and fearful. The bells, Harry thought. The damn bells.

He let the boy go, who backed off a little, still apologizing, then ran off toward a group of laborers working on the bridge footings, shouting to them. They all stopped work, and one yelled
“Vive la France! Aux armes, mes frères!”

Harry turned to Marina. “They’re at war,” he said. “Or will be within days.” It felt unreal and over-dramatic, as if they were spectators at some show that was not at all the one they had expected to see. Then, more practically, he said: “For every reason, we need to go to England as soon as possible.”

Back at the hotel, the elegant foyer, with its thick carpets and heavy flower arrangements, its burnished columns and quietly competent concierge, had turned into a circus of competing voices. Every other British and American guest also wanted to leave immediately. All that time, the bells tolled.

“Is there any answer to my cable?”

The clerk just shrugged.

“It’s not the troubles,” Harry said. “My father has just died. Please, I need to return very urgently.”

“I have a cab waiting,” said an English voice. A well-dressed man was standing next to him, looking calm but determined. “Wilding,” he said, and held out his hand. “It was taking us to the Gare du Nord, but I’ve heard it’s impossible to catch a train and the driver has agreed to take us all the way to the coast for the boat. He comes from the Pas de Calais and is eager to return home. I’m traveling with my wife and daughter, but we can take you with us if you wish. With only a small amount of luggage, I’m afraid.” He turned to Marina and smiled. “No doubt the hotel will store extra trunks until things have quieted down.”

The journey had been cramped and uncomfortable, but their companions’ conversation had helped pass the time. They, too, hoped for an onward ship to America. Wilding was evidently a very successful businessman with engineering factories across the continent. The family was returning from a holiday on the Swiss lakes. At the docks, a British officer boarded the train with two French gendarmes. They had an incomplete list of passengers and were checking them off by examining papers.

“They want to see if there are any Germans,” their new friend said with a shrug. “They won’t be welcome in England now.” After a brief pause and with a forced naturalness, he added: “I am myself half German, but fortunately not the half that provides my surname. Indeed, my sister was, until her death, married to a very English parson and my nephew is an organ scholar at Gloucester Cathedral.” He gave them one of his open smiles. “You can’t have better credentials than that, I feel. Nevertheless, I should feel happier to be in America for the duration of whatever is to come, and fortunately I have tickets for our onward voyage.” He looked at Marina. “For my wife’s sake, most of all. And my boys. Both at Harrow. No good having a father who has a connection with the enemy.”

“The Germans aren’t
our
enemy,” Harry said. “Our King’s grandfather was German. The Kaiser is his cousin.” But he knew he was being disingenuous.

“Not yet our official enemy. But you know as well as I do that they
will
be, of course. It’s been coming for years.”

The officer reached them. He was about the same age as Harry. “Do you think there’ll be war?” Mrs. Wilding asked, over-hastily. “I mean with us?”

The British officer looked surprised, though she could not have been the only person to ask him this.

“I think it is likely,” he said in a matter-of-fact way as he examined their papers. “We are bound to France by treaty.” He sounded businesslike, his opinion lacking the drama of every other speculative conversation Harry had heard. But then the man was presumably a regular; war was his profession.

“But we are much more like the Germans than any other nationality,” Mrs. Wilding said. “I mean, don’t you think?”

The officer only nodded as he eyed both the Wildings for a few seconds before walking on.

“My papers give my birthplace as Bremen,” Wilding said.

Later in the journey, Wilding and Harry had stood smoking on deck, watching as the cliffs of Dover seemed to grow a little closer. “It will be difficult for you,” Harry said. “You’ll have decisions ahead. And none of your choosing. I don’t envy you.”

“You too,” Wilding said. “You may live in America, but you are British. War will break out. Look around you.” He gestured out over the black waters. “The British could never let Germany conquer France, not least because they could then control the English Channel and that would cut Britain off. You might yet find yourself taking up arms.”

Harry started to laugh but was stopped by the expression on Wilding’s face.

“You have been too polite to ask me my business. What I make in my factories,” Wilding said. “How I became a wealthy man.”

“A British trait.” This time Harry did laugh. “In America they’ll have no such reticence. They’ll want to know how and how much.”

“I manufacture arms. It is strange, because I am very much a city man. I do not like shooting game or hunting. I abhor it, killing things, although in English society I keep that thought to myself. But arms were my father’s business, and now they are mine. What we are making now—the capacity for slaughtering men—is beyond even our generals’ imaginings.”

“Does our Navy have the edge on the Germans, do you think?” Harry said, conscious of having to make a decision as to whether Wilding was included in “our” or in “the Germans.”

“It won’t be a naval war. Whatever the British believe, or rather hope. Not dreadnoughts. Not cavalry with gleaming swords. This will be about the land, about earth. About infantry. Most of all, it will be about guns. New, powerful guns.” He looked grave. “Guns that can fire at invisible targets and men who will be killed by weapons they cannot see.

“America will keep itself out, I expect, unless its interests are seriously compromised. President Wilson will see to it. But you—and I—we can’t necessarily count on avoiding it all. Not because of our possibly ambiguous loyalties, nor where we choose to live.”

Harry thought he was wrong, but Wilding was in the business and he had no inclination to challenge him. Harry had made his choices: America, marriage, and Marina. Europe was making its choices, or being forced to, but he was no longer part of Europe. His loyalties lay across the Atlantic.

When they disembarked in Dover the customs officer told them, in some agitation, that Germany had declared war on France. The country whose great and beautiful capital Harry had strolled in just a day earlier, the country that lay so few miles to the south, that was visible across the Channel on a clear day, was under attack. He thought of the tense clerk at the hotel desk, the affable waiters who had served them in Nice, the carrier who had borne them to Calais, and the young workman, hardly more than a boy, who had told them of mobilization, and he wondered how quickly they would be scooped up into a war France could never win.

A chauffeur was waiting to take the Wildings to Hampshire, and Harry and Marina were proceeding to London by train. As it carried them north to Victoria, across the timeless chalky sweep of the downs, he was glad Marina was reading. He tried to process a confusion of thoughts. He was returning to England for the first time in a decade, and its very familiarity, and the lack of change in everything around him, suddenly compressed all those years. His chest was tight with emotions he thought he had mastered, and he was conscious of an odd intensity of recognition: of everything from the smell of the train to the landscape about him. Marina, who was his wife and had been so known, was suddenly and unnervingly foreign: she was a New Yorker, visiting the Old World; he was part of this world, and she was not.

The last time he had made this journey, he had been consumed by an urgent hunger for Isabelle and the terror of losing her. It had been only a fantasy of love, and lust that he had believed was love, all so bound up with betrayal that he now recalled it as tainted. Even the thought of her with tangled hair and abandoned limbs, or her sweetness, as it had seemed then, as she rested her cheek on his or stroked his hair, only made him angry with his youth and poor judgment.

They stayed at the Savoy, and there was relief in being free of the febrile atmosphere of Paris. He wondered: would the British honor their promise to France? At what cost to themselves? He found that he still liked to think of Britain as an honorable country.

Yet in the dining room the next morning, leaving Marina to breakfast in their room, he could tell immediately from how the staff held themselves, from the tension and movement of fellow guests, that something new had happened. The Germans had entered Belgium, and now the British government had issued an ultimatum.