The Gates of Rutherford (14 page)

They had reached a farm. They were taken inside a large barn, and, once inside, it was immediately obvious what was needed. The vast timber roof was leaking. They were told that tiles had come off in the winter storms. They had hung around for a long time while it was discussed how to get up on the roof, for this had apparently not been thought of. As they stood there, Frederick had realized that this was not necessarily because the English were stupid, but that possibly because there were simply no men to do the job or find any kind of scaffolding.

When the rain had eased, they started to go outside. Frederick was on one side of the yard when he saw a woman come out of the dairy buildings opposite. She was small and dark, and she was holding her hand to her mouth. He had turned his face away because she was obviously going to be sick. They all did so, out of deference to her condition. She ran around the side of the building, and, after a few moments, she reappeared, straightening herself, taking deep breaths, balancing herself against the wall of the dairy. And then she had noticed them, and—just as it had when she'd first glimpsed them all that morning—a dark shadow crossed her face. You would have thought that she had seen a line of devils opposite her by the way that she clenched her fists.

And then another woman had come out. She was the opposite in looks: very thin, and fair, and tall. She was calling,
Mary, Mary
. When she found the first woman, she listened to her, and then, with a jolt of surprise she had turned and looked across the yard.

She reminded him so much of the girls at home. The same coloring. Although German girls, farm girls, were heavier than she. Ruddy-faced for the most part. Hair plaited and swung over their shoulders, like this one. He had gazed with a half smile of recognition. She looked away from him, and the other woman sat down on a stone seat, evidently not caring that it was still wet from the rain. She seemed both angry and embarrassed. The second woman tugged at her hand a little, and then let her go, and looked around her with a kind of despair.

It was the vacant-faced guard who eventually walked across. The fair-haired woman spoke to him; he stared at his feet, then shrugged.

When he came back across, he glared at the line of prisoners.

“Anybody worked on a farm, dairy farm?” he asked.

No one replied.

The guard stamped his foot. “Cows,” he shouted. “Anybody worked . . . ?”

“We are a farm,” Frederick said. “At home.”

The guard came up to him. “You again.” He snorted derisively. “You'd be neither use nor ornament,” he said. “They want a hand turning the butter churn, else it spoils.”

“I can do it.”

“You can't hold a fuckin' spade right.”

“I can do it. I do before.”

He'd done it as a boy, because it was either boy's or woman's work. Tedious work, repetitive. You turned the wooden churn by hand, hearing the milk slop about inside. After a while the sounds changed. When you heard it slop heavier, when the churn itself became slightly unwieldy, it was butter, and the buttermilk was ready to be drained off. But you had to stand for a long time, turning the churn in the same way, at the same speed.

The guard looked over at the first woman, whose eyes were now
closed, her hands resting on her stomach. He looked at the anxious fair-haired girl. Then he relented.

“Seein' you try will be an education,” he muttered. He took Frederick's arm and marched him over, past the women, in under the low-framed door.

The dairy was a wonderful place. Cool, and very clean, the walls whitewashed, the floor scrubbed flagstone. He had not seen anywhere as white as this for how long? Perhaps never. Their own at home was a much dirtier, rough-and-ready affair. This bore the hallmarks of a wealthy enterprise somewhere, despite the broken roof of the barn. He had wondered what the cottage was like—it was hidden behind these outbuildings. He wondered if it had a fire, or a kitchen smelling of bread or baking. And then he was struck with such awful homesickness for his mother's
kaiserschmarrn
, the pancakes dusted in sugar, the compote she ladled in winter from the glass jars in the pantry that turned a December evening into summer.
Kaiserschmarrn
and strudel, and a fruit marbled cake that she made. It struck him so hard there, and all at once. Songs and
kaiserschmarrn
, who would have guessed that, to make the throat ache, the eyes sting? He had looked at his feet and taken a breath of the air.

It tasted of cream. Then he knew why the first woman had run out. If she was still early in her time, the thick sweet aroma might have not appealed to her at all. As he stood alongside the fair-haired woman came in, hesitantly, almost sidling along the wall to keep away from him.

“Well?” the guard demanded. “Well?”

“It's here,” she murmured. She placed one hand on the churn, a barrel with an iron handle. “I've tried and I can't get it right. I can't keep it regular. We've been sent down from the big house. There's nobody else to do it. But Mary . . . Mary is. . . .”

“All right,” the guard said. “This one reckons he knows how. So give him room.”

She stepped backwards smartly, and behind a table as if for protection.

Frederick walked over to the churn. He took off his coat and began a slow, determined rhythm. Listening to the sound, he stared at the wall, at the ridges of brick under the whitewash. He wondered which “big house” it was that the girl talked about. Another house to the farm? It seemed so. Perhaps that was the wealth that he saw reflected in the way that the dairy was organized. Money enough to make a decent place, even in a tenant farm. Money enough to maintain it. But no one to run it now, he told himself. A countryside leached of manpower, all gone to flounder in the mud of France.

He took both hands and placed his feet apart and persuaded himself that he wasn't holding anything but instead was attached to something that gently rotated, like a water wheel. That was better. Not holding anything. Pretend that, and ignore the tightening in his fingers. Tell himself a story, paint himself a picture; distract himself from the cramps that threatened to etch themselves into his muscles. He imagined himself back at the stream where he used to fish. He laid himself down in long grass. He closed his eyes and traveled, and the drum went with him, clucking and slapping softly inside the barrel. If he didn't think, if he didn't remember. That was the trick of it.

It took a long time, and when it was done he walked away and put on his coat.

The guard was smoking, leaning against the doorway.

Frederick kept his eyes to the floor and the fair girl walked across to him and looked up into his face and whispered, “Thank you.”

He saw that she was very thin, and not exactly pretty; but she had a charm to her face, an unexpected innocence and honesty that he
hadn't witnessed in anyone for a very long time. He had not meant to be familiar—to be familiar might frighten her, after all—but he couldn't help the gladness that came to his face.

And then a miracle happened. The pale, blond girl smiled back at him.

•   •   •

A
t the airfield in France, Harry Cavendish had received two letters that week.

One was from his mother. She told him all the details of Charlotte's wedding, and gave him his sister's new address in London. She told him that she herself was going up to Rutherford, and, while there, she would ask the whereabouts of Nash, and of Jack Armitage, because the family had not heard news of them in some time.

He could have told his mother that it was far better not to hear news. News was the kind of thing he had received from Caitlin.

He had read her letter while lying in his bunk. He honestly could not recall Eleanor, but he was heartily sorry for the end she had been dealt. He too was the deliverer of bombs, and had long ago ceased to think about their impact. There had been that time when he and three others had been detailed to bomb the railway station behind German lines, and that was not an incident that he cared to recall; neither the effect of the bomb, witnessed as he pulled away, nor the death afterwards of his fellow pilot in a dressing station.

He held the letter to his chest, and calculated his own odds. Caitlin perhaps was safer than she had been, if she was on her way to England. If she was in a nervous state, it might be that they would give her leave, or some job that was not so exhausting. She had been nursing now for over two years. It would be enough to cut the heart and soul out of any human being, and he hated to think that she felt herself to be of no consequence to him any longer.

He was just about done in himself. Not only did his damaged legs cause him grinding pain, but he was beginning to lose faith in his abilities to advise any pilot. They came over here elated in having passed their training, and God knew that it was a miracle they survived that. One in three never passed their final exam, because they were, to put it quite simply, dead. Smashed into the earth somewhere over jolly old Blighty. And so when they got out here, the light of defiance was in their faces. Defiance and devil-may-care. Wasn't that the badge of the RFC? Three years of war had turned those flying gladiators into screeching Valkyries.

“I'm as wretched as she is,” he whispered to himself. “Won't do, won't do.”

It was still light, late in the afternoon. He would go out and watch for the last sortie coming back. The RFC had twenty-five squadrons, over three hundred and fifty aircraft. A hundred of those were scouts, the fighters. He wished passionately that they had more SPADs or Sopwith Triplanes; they were the ones that seemed to be doing better against the Albatros of the Germans. The Albatros gave the enemy the upper hand, he was sure; they were more manoeuvrable, and they didn't have the outdated FE8, the lumbering machines that he himself had always disliked. Two days ago, a new plane had arrived, something they called a Bristol F2a. His commanding officer had told him it would be the savior of the squadron. But out of the six that went up, four had been shot down.

Bloody fucking Albatros. It was indeed like its namesake; it would be hung around their own necks as a sign of their inefficiency and disgrace. He wondered how many would be lost as the battle was launched on Arras. And what made it worse was the new red plane up there and the pilot that manned it. It was rumored that his name was Von Richthofen. He was the very devil, and in any other circumstances Harry would have admired him. But he couldn't
muster a shred of admiration for whoever the man was who kept smashing his own men out of the sky with his tricks and shows.

What the hell were they going to do about it? he wondered. Keep throwing young men up there? What was he going to say to John Gould when he eventually arrived here? That the RFC was in glorious ascendance, in every sense of the word? He couldn't lie to Gould: the American would see straight through him. The man had an unerring ability to do that.

“Damn it,” he muttered. He never left the ground these days, or only rarely. It was his job to come up with tactical solutions and advise on what was needed. But in truth he didn't know what else could be needed other than a fucking miracle.

He turned on his heel, and went back to the mess room. Here, he got a sheet of paper and began to write as if his life depended on it.

Dear Charlotte,
he began.

I hear that you had a very nice wedding. Dear girl, I hope that you are happy. You should be with such a fine man as Michael. And so I'm sorry to give you a job while you're in the first throes of marital bliss. But would you do something for your beloved brother? I want you to find somebody for me. A nurse coming back on the convoys. You know Caitlin, don't you? You'll know where she's posted. If you can't find her, perhaps Mother will. . . .

He stopped. He could hear a plane coming back, a fractured noise, its engine misfiring somewhere above the airfield.

It's rather important
, he scribbled.

The misfiring stopped. The silence was more shattering than the original sound. He gritted his teeth, and continued.

At least
, he wrote,
it is to me. . . .

I
t was ten a.m. on Sunday morning when Charlotte knocked on Christine Nesbitt's narrow door.

It was in a dirty little street between Bloomsbury and Berwick Street Market. If Charlotte had been asked to describe it to her mother, she would have said that it was in Oxford Street to avoid Octavia being worried—she would have described some of the little avenues behind the large shops where sweet little mews houses had been converted from stores or stables. But, in reality, Christine's studio was in Soho, the part of the capital regularly described as a den of iniquity. It would have given William Cavendish forty fits if he had seen his daughter alone there.

It was three weeks since the wedding, but Charlotte did not think about that anymore. It seemed a very long time ago, a place where she still had some of her illusions intact. She looked up at the building, taking a step back on the pavement to stare upwards at what she believed must be Christine's window.

Eventually, she heard a clatter of feet on the stairs. The door was
suddenly flung open, and, instead of Christine, Charlotte found herself face-to-face with a man of about thirty: he wore no starched collar, no tie. His hair was uncombed. He stood in the doorway and smiled at her broadly, pulling on a crumpled jacket.

Two things, she knew, would stand in her memory. The first was that his shoes were unpolished. She had never come across anyone who wore unpolished shoes—anyone who was not a workman, that is. And the second was that, with his startlingly blue eyes and thick dark hair, the stranger was incredibly handsome.

“Hello,” he said. “Looking for someone?”

“Christine.”

He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Third floor.”

“Which door?”

“There is only one.”

He stood to one side; she entered. He disappeared along the street, hands in pockets.

For a while, Charlotte stood at the bottom of the stairs looking at her feet, wondering about the shoes and the uncombed hair. He had spoken like a gentleman. That was the odd thing about it, the thing that made no sense to her.

When she got to the top of the stairs, she found Christine leaning on the landing bannister and grinning down at her.

“Why, if it isn't Mrs. Preston! How perfectly lovely.”

“Hello, Christine.”

Charlotte was suddenly enveloped by a hug, and Christine took her hand. “Come in, come in,” she said. “This is wonderful! I didn't think you'd come at all.”

“I sent a letter.”

“Did you? Have I forgotten it? What did it say?”

“To make an appointment for today.”

Christine smiled at her. “But you don't need to make an
appointment. Not for me. Unless . . . oh.” Her eyes strayed to the stair, and she began to laugh. “Perhaps you do.”

The room was unlike anything Charlotte had ever seen.

It occupied the whole of the top of the house, and had evidently been an attic. The ceiling was merely the roofbeams, looking very rickety and haphazard. One wall was half glass and half brick. In the corner was a partition made with a curtain, behind which Christine immediately disappeared. By the clatter and the sound of water, Charlotte surmised that this was a little kitchen. On either side of the large glass windows were the most astonishing curtains, strung up on a piece of wood balanced on either end of a pile of ordinary bricks, and tied back with something that looked like dressing-gown cord. They looked monstrously heavy—absurd, really, for the room—but such a fabulous color. Orange, with emerald linings and some sort of large circular print in green.

Christine had poked her head out from behind the partition. “Tea?”

“Yes, please.”

“Will you take it black? There isn't any milk.”

“Oh . . .”

“It's awfully good. Earl Grey. The disapproving aunt sent it. Rather better without milk.”

“All right.”

While Christine continued to clatter cups, Charlotte turned full circle to gaze at the rest of the room.

There was no carpet on the floor. At one end, there was a kind of chaise longue, quite broad. On it was a single sheet and a pile of pillows and cushions. The sheet was hanging half off the bed, and beside it was a fruit packing case with an oil lamp balanced on top. At various points on the floor and on the windowsill were candles in tin saucers.

But the item that dominated the room was the table. It was enormous; how it had ever made it up the stairs was a mystery, Charlotte thought. Perhaps it had been actually built in the room. It seemed to be made of building planks—the kind used in construction works. She had seen them on scaffolding in the street nearby, close to the market. She wondered if that was where they had come from.

The table was covered in paper and paint. Glass jars smeared with paint and various ones holding water or turpentine. Brushes lay on smeared cloths, or were stuck into pottery jugs. Against the table leg at one side, several canvases were stacked. And at the far end of the table was an easel, with whatever canvas was on it turned away from the room as a whole.

Charlotte couldn't quite describe the smell. It was a mixture of stale cooking, paint, damp, and the peculiar chemical odor of wet newsprint. It ought to have been appalling, but somehow it wasn't. Perhaps because it was so foreign to her, so unusual, so interestingly awful.

Christine emerged from the partition. She was carrying two large cups without saucers. “Here we are,” she announced. She put the cups on the table amid the paint and brushes. “Now, I will find us a seat. Only there isn't a seat.” She appeared to think, and then picked the cups up again. “We'll have to camp down on the bed,” she said.

Charlotte followed her. As Christine put the cups on the floor, and made a scrambled attempt to straighten the sheet and covers, Charlotte found herself blushing. She bit her lip and glanced back at the vast table. “You paint and live and sleep in the same room?”

“There isn't any other, dearest.”

“But for . . . washing . . .”

“There's a bathroom two flights down. I share it with a Jewish family and an old lady from . . . where is it? Oh, Genoa. She's a witch, I think. She actually tells fortunes. She's utterly hopeless at it and
spits if you tell her she's a fake. The family are nice, though. Four little boys, and they parade them like a set of Russian dolls when they go to synagogue.”

“Is it noisy?”

“Not at all. But the fish you can smell . . . that's them. I do apologize for it. Some kind of pickled fish, I think. Do you know the market? They run a stall there. Stockings. We'll go and look at it. Silk stockings, you know.”

They sat side by side sipping their tea.

“What do you think of my room?” Christine asked.

Charlotte looked up again at the table, the curtains, and the bare floorboards. “I think it's wonderful,” she said.

Christine laughed. “You don't have to be polite.”

“Oh, I'm not being polite,” Charlotte replied. “It
is
wonderful. It's . . . empty. And full.”

“It's empty of Victoriana,” Christine said. “And full of me.”

“Yes. That's exactly it.”

“Didn't you grow up in rooms like that? Full of knickknacks and useless chairs and little tables with horrible little ornaments, and damned great aspidistras?”

Charlotte smiled. “My mother's got a good eye,” she said. “But it sounds like how Rutherford was when she married Father.”

“Hunting prints, I expect?”

“And stuffed heads.”

“Poor beleaguered foxes, and rugs made of dead tigers?”

“Not quite as bad as that.”

“Let me imagine. . . . Your father's bedroom has a Landseer print on the wall.
The Stag at Bay.
”

“Yes, it does.”

Christine clapped her hands in delight, and they both laughed.

“My God, the seed we sprang from,” Christine said. “Shooting beautiful creatures and putting them in glass cases. Macabre. Bizarre.”

Charlotte had never thought of this before. Rutherford was just as it was; she felt a need to defend it. In the last three weeks she had longed for her home, wanted so desperately to turn back the clock and be a girl again, running through the grounds, playing in the stream with Harry, or sitting idly in the huge glasshouse where the pineapples grew and which was always scented heavily with exotic lilies, and to have Louisa brushing her hair for minutes on end as she used to do.

Christine was assessing her, watching her face. “That's odd. I thought you'd certainly find it horrible. Are you sure you're not being polite?” she asked. “Because I would really rather you wouldn't. I don't need your approval.”

“I don't give it,” Charlotte told her. “It's not my business to approve or disapprove.”

“How like your father you sound,” Christine observed. “I suppose now you're talking about Alexis.”

“Alexis?”

“You must have bumped straight into him.”

“Yes, I met him. If that's his name.”

“His name is Alexis Barrington. He's a fourth son. Of a duke. He paints. And spends his father's money rather rashly. You're a second daughter, aren't you? I shall introduce you if he ever comes back.” She finished her tea, and leapt to her feet. “Where is Michael?” she asked, looking down at Charlotte, hands on hips. “I thought you were both coming.”

“I wanted to come alone.”

“Have you been sent to reconnoiter?”

“Not at all. Michael decided against a portrait for himself, or of the two of us. But I thought . . . well, my mother always had a lovely
portrait of herself when she had first been married. It's on the stairs at Rutherford. A Singer Sargent.”

“Singer Sargent?” Christine echoed. “Good God above, I hope you're not expecting to come here in an ocean of satin and be turned out looking like one of his.”

Charlotte smiled. “I would like to look like myself, that's all.”

“You mean, not cubist. Not surreal. Not with four heads or a composition in feet.”

“My father wouldn't pay you.”

“Don't worry,” Christine replied, unoffended. “I don't do that anyway. You saw what I do when I came to Rutherford. I haven't moved away from that much. Less colors, though. A restricted palette.” She put her head to one side. “You're awfully pale. Do you want to be represented as pale?”

“I don't know.”

“You've never struck me as pale. That's odd. You've always been vibrant.”

Charlotte said nothing. She sipped her tea.

“Goodness me,” Christine exclaimed suddenly. “You must be pregnant. That must be the cause.” She laughed, and came to sit quickly beside Charlotte. She put her hand on Charlotte's arm. “Aren't you well? I can't paint you if you're going to turn green and suddenly run out because of the smell in here. . . .”

“I'm not pregnant.”

“But of course, you wouldn't know. Only three weeks. But you
could
be, you see?” She looked closely at Charlotte, and then put both hands on her shoulders and gently turned her body left and right. “There is something different,” she said. “Quite definitely.”

Charlotte could not bring herself to comment. She sat mutely, allowing herself to be manoeuvred.

“Perhaps it's added something,” Christine mused. “A kind of
delicacy.” She looked down at Charlotte's clothes. “Are you going to be painted in this?”

“What's the matter with it?”

“A plain wool suit. And grey. And a hat. Surely not?”

“It's a very good suit.”

“No, it isn't,” Christine decided. “It might be practical, but who wants to be remembered for being practical? Preserved forever as dutiful?”

“I like being dutiful,” Charlotte said, thinking of her work at St. Dunstan's.

“Of course you don't!” Christine exclaimed. “You might obey and be very charming. You might even do it with a glint in your eye. But you can't be defined by it, painted as if that's all you were. It might be appropriate for a lady mayoress, or the wife of the master of the local Hunt. But not for you.” She jumped again to her feet. Within a pace or two she was at the table, and she came back with a few scraps of paper, on which various colors were splashed.