The Last Summer (24 page)

D
earest T, I have delayed my response to your last simply because it was (to me) incomprehensible. There is no hypocrisy on my part, is there on yours? I endeavour to do what I believe is right for each of us, and this in itself is a burden to me, and yes, to my conscience, which I now realise is that part of me you neither understand nor have any desire to understand . . . and I am deeply sorry if I have failed you. Do not for one moment think I am untouched or untroubled by this, I have given it a great deal of thought, but it is the only way, & nothing to do with being part of any ‘smart set’. Dearest, you speak of love as though it were a thing beyond morality – or what is decent – and yet didn’t you also once tell me how inherently noble and good Love is? Can you not see how it would be otherwise? I’m afraid there was no alternative. Yrs, D

Was it some sort of nervous breakdown? I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’d heard that phrase then, or even if it had been invented. But weeks slipped by and I rarely left my room; I didn’t want to, couldn’t face anyone, couldn’t face life. Dr Riley came to
call once or twice, but he spoke to my mother and not to me. He prescribed tablets; to help me sleep, Mama said. But I didn’t need tablets to help me sleep; I needed tablets to help me wake up, to help me wake up from my nightmare. The only person I saw, apart from Mama and the doctor, was Venetia, once, when she came up to my room to see me. She brought me a silk scarf from Liberty’s and was as effervescent as ever.

‘Your mama’s told me you’ve been a little off colour, dear; not quite yourself since you returned from Devon . . .’

I tried to smile.

‘Well, really, it was always a bad idea. I told your Mama that at the time . . . I said to her, “Edina, Devon is so terribly, terribly damp, and so very far away!”’ She reached out, stroked my cheek. ‘Poor child, I’m not surprised, not surprised in the least that you’ve returned here lacklustre and depressed. I should too, I’d imagine – had I been sent there!’

She went on to give me her summary of news, a catalogue of back-dated events I’d missed, and snippets of gossip, punctuated every so often by a roll of the eyes, a sigh or a shrug.

But I didn’t hear any of it. I watched her as though I was watching someone on a stage, a character from a play; I even saw myself upon the same stage: the sickly girl in the bed. And I found myself wondering about Venetia and her life. Had she ever known heartache or loss? Perhaps she had. But it struck me that day how childlike she was, the extraordinary result of a life spent in a rarefied, cosseted world. The world I’d once been destined for. And suddenly I felt years older than my godmother, a woman who had only ever ventured beyond Mayfair to attend the theatre or the opera, or to stay in a grand country house. But I was different, I realised. And, though Venetia saw the same Clarissa, lying next to her, albeit pale and
lacklustre
, I was already changed, already altered by the path of my life. I would never be the person I’d once been destined to become.

I wondered who her latest lover was, which young officer was dedicating poetry to her from the trenches, and what she said to them. Did she speak to them of love? Is that what it was that drew them to her? Or was it something else? Yes, she was beautiful, and yes, she was voluptuous, but was that enough to sustain them? And then it dawned on me: perhaps it was. Perhaps Venetia, with her love of all things frivolous and gay, and her tactile maternal ways, offered them a backward glance; reminding them of that other time, what they had left behind; what we had all of us left behind.

Later, I heard them on the landing, talking. ‘Well, you know Clarissa, she’s always been a sensitive creature . . . always felt life a little
too
much. And this blasted war . . . our own losses have hit her hard,’ Mama said, and I smiled, as much at her ingenuity as her disingenuousness.

When I remembered the time before the war, it was the light I remembered most of all. As though the killing fields of France and Flanders had released tiny particles into the atmosphere, filtering out the sun’s rays, absorbing that brightness I remembered. And with each year the air had grown thicker and darker still. And with each year my memories of that time had intensified in their luminosity; cherished snapshots now phosphorescent beacons.

Can it really be three summers since we all sat about on the lawn, like children, drinking lemonade, the boys full of bravado and desperate to impress the girls? Has it only been three years?

At night I’d pull back the curtains of my bedroom window and stare out across the darkened city. I’d follow the searchlight’s nervous beam up, up, up through the clouds into the inky black sky, staring into heaven, seeking out the enemy. Like a wound healing, there was a nerve in me slowly coming back to life. The ache for my baby had lessened; now only occasionally did I experience that gnawing agony, that wrench. And I’d learnt to
live with it. I had to. I’d limited my thoughts of her to the abstract. She was a name, and though she was my baby, in my mind she had to become
a
baby. I could not bear to think of anything specific as to her situation or her whereabouts; whether she was lying in a cot of some far-flung orphanage, alone, or in someone else’s arms, looking up into their eyes. I simply couldn’t follow her path, either in reality or in my imagination. I’d handed her over, I’d given her away, and in doing so I had no rights to any imagined smile or gurgle. But sometimes, alone in my room, I said her name out loud.

‘Emily . . . Emily Cuthbert.’

‘There’ll be another. There’ll be more babies for you. You’ll see, when the time is right . . . when you’re a little older, married,’ one of the sisters had said to me, shortly before I left Plymouth, as though my grief was for a misplaced favourite hat.

I’m sure that Mama, and Charlie too, thought that planning our wedding would give me something to look forward to, something to help me recover from whatever it was I was suffering from. But I had no interest in any wedding, least of all my own. So, as Mama brought swatches of duchesse satin and silks to my room for me to hold and compare, I feigned preferences for this one or that. She sat patiently with her notebook in hand, listing guests we’d need to invite: a depressing task in itself, due to the names of those absent from that list or any future list. She made a point of being cheery, talking of the future, never the past. And she never mentioned Papa, or Will, or George. She never mentioned Deyning, or Tom Cuthbert, and of course she never mentioned my baby.

‘When the war is over,’ she said to me one day, ‘I shall take you to Paris, darling. You never had your time there, I’m quite aware of that. I’ll take an apartment . . . and we’ll do all the things you always wished to do. We’ll shop on the rue St Honore . . . visit Worth . . . go to the Louvre. Would you like that?’

‘Yes, Mama. That would be nice.’

Sometimes she’d look into my eyes with such sadness in her own that I wondered what, exactly, she wanted to say; for I sensed her burden, the weight of words unspoken, still longing to be said. But my mother had never allowed herself such freedom. Truth was something one held tight, like honour and sacrifice, and all those other now tattered ideals she hung on to. And I wondered how many words she’d never uttered; how many tears she’d never shed; how many secrets she held in her heart, and all those words, all those words she’d never allowed herself to say.

But I knew three of them, at least. Three words she’d never utter, no matter what. Because speaking them would mean admitting a mistake; and Mama
never
made a mistake. And yet, already, I knew that I had: I’d made a mistake in agreeing to marry Charlie. I was fond of him, I loved him – loved him like a brother, but I could not marry him; I could not lie, say ‘I do’ and become his wife.

I decided not to speak to my mother about this. It was between me and Charlie, and no one else. For a while I contemplated writing to him, to try to explain. I composed a few different versions of a letter to him in my head. But it seemed so cruel, so uncaring, to put those words of rejection – no matter how dressed up – down on paper, and then post them out to him, with a ‘love from Clarissa’ at the end. I imagined him in some dark and muddy trench, leaning against a pile of filthy sandbags, reading my letter, his heart aching . . . his heart breaking. And I couldn’t do it. It would have to wait. I’d tell him in person.

. . . I too am sorry. I do not speak about it because I do not wish to, and, I imagine, neither does she. She is fine, a little fragile, and – as ever – somewhat distracted, but she is moving on with her life, and this
is good. I try so very hard to be brave, to keep faith, but I am severely tested. I am weary of writing letters of condolence, of trying to find words – which no longer seem to carry any meaning or weight. What can one say? We have all suffered, & too much for any words of sympathy . . . and the sight of more weeping mothers in the street – preceded by yet another Union Jack-covered coffin, cause me to question everything I once believed in, & all that I am.

. . . I am not sure where to send this letter, or even if I will post it, but I want you to know that I forgive you. I forgive you for not writing to me, I forgive you for abandoning me, & I forgive you for not caring about what has become of me. Shall I tell you? Shall I let you in on the secret? Well, for a while I went quite doolally, oh yes, quite doolallylally. In fact, I may even still be, in which case you can ignore everything I write here and resume normal duties. You see, I’m not altogether sure that I’m equipped to deal with this war, this bloody bloody bloody stupid bloody war, & this awful life. No one issued me with a tin hat, or a uniform, or any armour, and I shall never be awarded anything. I shall receive no badge or medals, and no one is allowed to know . . . will ever know. Oh, but I forgot, it’s different for me, isn’t it? I don’t need to ‘win’ anything. I must be content with loss, & losing . . .

For me there was no beginning, no middle and no end, there was just one long and bloody war. I tried to imagine a time when there would be no war, but that great well of optimism, like my sense of patriotism, had almost run dry. I tried to
remember that summer, the summer before the war, but it seemed to me a lifetime ago. And it was. It was hundreds of thousands of lifetimes ago. For how many had gone? Everyone I knew had lost brothers, cousins, lovers, fiancés, and friends. And yet we, the young still living, browbeaten by numbers and anaesthetised by grief, clung on to our stale dreams and shrivelled hopes, and that fine silver thread, the future.