The Last Summer (16 page)

. . . I don’t understand why you haven’t written, and now my heart is fit to burst & I feel even more desperate, because we are leaving here, leaving Deyning, & I shan’t be here when you return (there is no IF, only WHEN). Today I walked down through the meadow to the lake & I thought only of you, I thought of you all day, & all day yesterday, and the day before that . . . If this reaches you, please write to me . . . write to me in London. Everything here is truly awful, but nothing compared to what you’re going through . . . Oh my darling, I love you, I do love you, & I don’t care what you say about waiting until this thing is over . . . I know only what I FEEL.

On our last night at Deyning we retired to our beds early. With nothing of comfort to sit upon – and nothing much to look upon – it seemed the only thing to do. In my bedroom I stood for a while in my nightgown looking out of the window. But there was little to see or bid adieu to. The moon lay on its back, slumped in the distance beyond the trees: a bright white sliver of a crescent, rocking low in the blackness, like a deflated balloon, which had shrivelled and then slipped.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I slept badly that night, my dreams filled with Deyning, and angst-ridden conversations with a whole array of people about its future. And for the first time in years another dream came back to me.

When I was young I’d had a recurring dream about an invisible door, a kind of opening in the ceiling of the drawing room, through which all sorts of strange children were able to enter the house. Literally, dropped in from above. That night I dreamt I was standing in that place once again, and this time the sun shone down through the invisible hole in the ceiling. I felt its heat, and an utterly sublime sense of peace. Then, through the sunshine, it began to rain, and as I stood there, my arms outstretched under that heavenly shower, and looking up into the light, a tiny girl fell through the hole to my feet. She was a child, but so very, very small, with black hair and the brightest blue eyes. She smiled up at me with perfect white teeth. ‘He’s always here,’ she said, pointing. I turned, and looked into darkness. And when I turned back to her – she’d gone.

Early the following morning, before setting off for London, I stood on the terrace with Papa watching armoured biplanes fly over the house. Like a swarm of tiny toy flying machines they buzzed high above us, moving in and out of mist and low cloud.

Will . . .

My brother William, by now attached to the Royal Flying
Corps, had been taught to fly in a matter of weeks, and had only recently been deployed to the war zone, piloting one of those tiny wooden biplanes over the muddy fields of France and Flanders. I turned to my father, and when I saw his face he looked so different to the Papa of my childhood: anxious and, suddenly, old.

I took his hand in mine. ‘Don’t worry, Papa, God will keep William safe.’

He looked down, shook his head. ‘I’m not so sure . . . no, I’m not so sure God can keep them safe.’

‘Don’t say that,’ I said, gripping his hand. ‘We have to keep faith . . . we have to. The war will end one day soon,’ I went on determinedly, and despite knowing that no one, least of all my father, believed this. ‘Then things will go back to normal. All will be as it was.’

I’d never heard my father talk like that, never seen him look so troubled.

He sighed, looked skywards again. ‘Yes, yes, the war will end one day, Clarissa, it has to; but England will be a different place, the world will be a different place . . .’ He turned to me. ‘And you know, I rather liked things as they were. I’ve never wished for change . . . and I’m too old for it now,’ he added, releasing my hand and walking away.

I took one last look across the ragged, uncut lawns. The air smelt of decay and rotting vegetation, and a chilled grey mist hung over the place, almost but not quite obliterating colour and shape, but blurring lines, rendering everything in front of me gloomy and drab: a ghost of what she once was, I thought.

Minutes later, as our motor car pulled away, I turned and looked back at the house. In front of it stood Mrs Cuthbert, Mr Broughton and the handful of servants who’d helped to pack the place up. And as we moved away, down the long avenue of beech trees, I watched them become smaller and smaller, and
smaller still, until they disappeared into the stone façade of Deyning, and then, finally, it disappeared too. As we passed by the white gate and turned out on to the road I wondered if we’d ever again live at Deyning, if life would ever be the way it used to be. And I thought of
him
, somewhere in France. He’d return there, God willing, but I’d no longer be there. Deyning was not part of my life any more, and, it seemed, neither was he.

. . . When we finally arrived in the town we simply flooded the place, & then lay about in the streets waiting to find out where we were to be billeted. A few of the chaps here seem to think the worst is over, & we’re all praying, hoping that this is the case, and that by the time our turn comes we’ll have had some good news . . . but in truth I know this is unlikely. Anyway, I am in a small farm cottage with five others, and a fire! So for now, at least, I am warm, and able to think . . . think of you.

We regret to inform you
. . . the telegram began.
Seen to fall . . . shot down over enemy lines.

I didn’t and couldn’t believe the words, though I saw them for myself. For how could my brother, William, be dead? He’d only just learnt to fly, only just gone. And the war would surely be over soon. It was a mistake, it had to be. There’d be another telegram, I told Mama; another one to tell us that they’d made a mistake. He was twenty years old, people didn’t die at that age, didn’t get killed. His face flashed before me, animated, laughing; alive. It was a mistake, it had to be; a dreadful mistake. But I saw the line in my mother’s brow, an ever-deepening line. I saw my parents’ grief. And the sight of them sobbing into each other’s arms told me that the only mistake was my heart’s inability to accept my brother’s fate. William
had
been killed. And I kept saying it to myself:
William is dead . . . William is dead.

Weeks after we’d learned of Will’s death Papa took ill with pneumonia, and my mother’s grief was postponed while she focused her attention and energy on him. The doctor came to the house each morning, and as I stood on the landing, straining
to hear the hushed conversation below me, I heard him repeat one word: grief. I wondered then if Papa felt guilty, for he’d been the one who had persuaded William, eventually, to go and fight. I’d heard them arguing in the library, days before William signed up. ‘No son of mine will be a shirker!’ Papa had said, and in an unusually loud and angry voice.

Of course, there could be no funeral for Will: like so many others, his body, what – if anything – was left of him, could never be recovered. All that had been returned to us were a few items of uniform, two books and some letters. I pondered on that, and on those words,
seen to fall
. But I could not bear to think of my brother falling from the sky; hurtling towards the ground, on fire, knowing he was about to die. It was too much. And without a body, without evidence, how could they know for sure that he’d been killed? Could he have survived? Was it possible? Sometimes this train of thought offered me a glinting light of hope. I imagined Will arriving back at home, laughing at us for thinking him dead, and then explaining that he’d been on some secret mission: under cover, behind enemy lines. It
was
possible. It could happen. At other times it made sense to me that my brother, the theology student, the one closest to God, had been plucked from this life in the heavens. I’d close my eyes. Of course! William didn’t spiral back down to earth; he simply cast off that reluctant soldier’s body . . . his soul remains up there, in the sky. William: an angel.

I thought of Tom, wondered where he was. Did he think of me still? Did he remember me? I tried to recall our conversations, but fact and fiction had muddled themselves, and I couldn’t now be sure if some of the lines I credited him with were mine and not his. I tried to picture his face, those dark solemn eyes, but already his image had begun to fade. Sometimes his face would come to me, in all its beauty, and then slip away again.
And I’d struggle, struggle so hard to conjure it back, focusing on a specific moment . . . that evening by the ha-ha, when I’d watched him as he smoked his cigarette; and I could
almost
picture his profile. But like every other cherished memory of that last summer, it too had faded. I tried to remember his kiss, the feel of his lips upon mine, but it seemed as though that memory, too, was slipping away from me.

Don’t leave me; never leave me.

My mother forgot all about parties and balls. She spent her days scouring the newspaper for names she knew, searching through the Roll of Honour, tracking the movement of regiments, battalions, and events
over there
. Henry was mentioned in despatches, and so too was Jimmy Cooper. But a son’s fearlessness on a battlefield in another country only exacerbated the sense of fear and dread at home. And, rather than an end in sight, we appeared to be going further and further away from
the beginning
, from that point of faith and hope and optimism.

Long numbers, numbers with more noughts than I’d ever seen before, were printed each day: 500,000 men to Rumania; 300,000 more men needed; 70,000 more men despatched; 126,000 men taken prisoner, 258,000 casualties . . . endless numbers, printed in heavy black ink. We read of the German prisoners transported to Frimley, where crowds had gone to see them – only to discover they’d already been transported to the Isle of Man. We read of the German submarines off the coast, torpedoes and air raids; bombs dropped on familiar seaside resorts up and down the country. And we read of the continuing struggle at Ypres. We read about asphyxiating gases and pulled out the encyclopaedia; of the events in Basra, the Dardanelles and Gallipoli – and pulled out the atlas. We read of the sinking of the
Lusitania
and of more airship raids on the coast. And in the early hours of the morning of May the thirty-first the Zeppelin arrived, and we heard the bombs fall on London.

Together and separately we surveyed the endless daily images of war published in the
Illustrated London News:
double-page black and white photographs straight from the front; drawings of scenes of carnage, our troops and the fighting. I studied these pictures with a morbid fascination, for the churned-up, charred landscape they depicted was unlike any I had ever seen or could ever – even in my worst nightmares – have imagined. It was the landscape of Hell. And the notion that Tom or my brothers could be one of the murky figures in the foreground was too horrendous to contemplate.