The Last Summer (34 page)

‘Really . . . I had no idea.’

And it struck me then, the separateness of our lives. For Tom had been living on the other side of the world, living on another continent, for almost as long as I’d been living my new married life in London.

‘How strange,’ I said, thinking out loud.

‘Why’s that?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Oh, nothing. I just thought . . . thought he would be living here in London . . . thought he would be in the city.’

He laughed. ‘No, not Cuthbert. He was always restless, even at Oxford. Never quite . . . fitted in. And I suppose he’s gone
to make his fortune
.’ He laughed again, and for some reason I did too.

And then I said, ‘But you know . . . he probably will, Jimmy.’

‘Ha! Yes, you’re right, he probably will. And he’ll no doubt return here one day waving his crisp American dollars in all our faces!’

‘No, he’d never do that. He’d never be arrogant or ostentatious in that way.’

He looked at me curiously. ‘You rather liked him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling, ‘yes I did.’

That same night, back at our home, Charlie had come to my room. I was tired, told him I wanted to sleep. He was drunk, and more unsteady on his feet than usual. He hated his walking stick, hated his disability and, perhaps, hated himself. He was in an angry, belligerent mood, and when he stumbled and I climbed from my bed to help him, he turned and shouted, ‘No! I don’t need your help! I don’t need a bloody nurse, I need a wife.’

‘You have a wife, Charlie. I’m your wife.’

He moved over to me, his face inches from mine. ‘Yes, you’re
my wife and you’re
stuck
with me, Clarissa. And I’m
stuck
with you!’

‘Is that what you think?’ I asked quietly. ‘Is that how you feel?’

‘What do you care how I feel? What do you know? You know nothing . . . nothing at all about suffering and pain, real pain. Oh yes, yes, you lost your brothers – and you never let us forget that, but you’ve never had to give up anything, anything of yourself, never had to sacrifice anything. You don’t know what it’s like . . . you have no idea. And look at you . . . you can’t even produce a baby.’

I closed my eyes, waited a moment before I spoke. ‘I know it’s difficult for you, and I try to understand . . . really I do.’ I reached out, touched his arm. ‘I’m sorry.’

He turned to me. ‘But you’re always bloody sorry!’ he shouted. And then he pushed me back on to the bed. ‘And if you’re really sorry,’ he continued, unbuckling his belt, ‘you’ll fulfil your obligations . . . as my
wife
.’

I didn’t protest, didn’t say anything. And I didn’t push him away. I didn’t move. I lay on the bed, exactly where I’d fallen. I looked away from his contorted face, closed my eyes and tried to shut out the pain; tried to imagine I was somewhere else:
. . . the lower meadow . . . the lower meadow; under the tree . . . look up, see the sky . . . see the clouds . . .

When he’d finished, he struggled up from the bed, picked up his stick, and then left the room. He didn’t say anything, didn’t speak. What could he have said? What was there to say? I was his wife. He was my husband.

Minutes later, I heard him leave the house.

I’m not sure how long I lay there. All I remember is a burning pain, and the
tick-tock
. . .
tick-tock
. . .
tick-tock
. . . of the clock. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to acknowledge what had just taken place in any sob or sound of anguish. Even then, I knew it had to be locked away. Forgotten.

‘America,’ I whispered. ‘America . . .’ I said again, louder. I wanted to hear myself speak, to shatter the silence, break through the hideous echo. And as I spoke the name of that faraway continent I imagined Tom, standing, looking out from one of those very tall buildings; so tall and so high he could see across the curve of the earth’s surface to England, to London, to the light of my room, to me.

‘Tom . . .’

Was that to be it? I wondered. Were my snatched moments with him to be the sum total of my experience of passion and real love in this life? Were they already spent? Had I already and unknowingly passed through my zenith: that moment of unutterable perfection, when everything is the very best it can be, will ever be?

Oh, but you had it, you had it, Clarissa, and you knew it . . .

And at that moment I thought of William, hurtling towards the ground in a burning aeroplane. I thought of him
and
George. They had both died so young; had either of them ever known
real
passion, passionate love? And I so hoped that they had. I hoped that each of them had known at least one moment, one splendid, unforgettable moment; one that in the hour of their death they’d been able to return to; to know that they had lived, truly lived.

I felt a solitary tear slide down my temple into my hair.

No self-pity, Clarissa, no self-pity . . . think of them; think of all of them.

And I did.

I saw Frank’s whitened cricket shoes, Hugo Hamilton’s bow tie; Julian’s pale lips, and Archie’s smile; I saw hands waving back at me from a train carriage window, and boys in uniform – standing proud and tall. I saw my father, his map and his pins and his bits of ribbon, and the men at the station, tattered and frayed and caked in mud; and the men in red coats, and the
posters and words; the words, and the gloves . . . the gloves, the balaclavas, the socks; the socks and the gloves, and the uniforms sent home . . . the mud and blood and the uniforms sent home. Home.

. . . I am quite well, & continue to distract myself with the social merry-go-round here, and my friend V’s (who’s quite the Bohemian now) new interest in Spiritualism. She’s rather keen for me to attend one of her séances, telling me that G or W may well ‘come through’, and though it’s tempting, I’m not sure . . . Of course, there was a time when I would never have entertained such an idea, but V assures me that no HARM can be done, & that her Madam Zelda (apparently the very best & most fashionable in all of London) never fails to bring Them through . . .

When I recall the winters of my childhood they’re inevitably bathed in a pure white light, the reflection of a frozen landscape. I remember awakening to that brilliance, seeping into my room through the heavy winter drapes; the rush of chilled air as I threw back the eiderdown and climbed from my bed; the ice on the inside of the windowpanes; and the world beyond, a place of strange new shapes and alabaster stillness.

Once, when I was still quite young and my parents away in London, we awoke at Deyning to find the thickest blanket of
snow I’d ever seen. It was over a foot deep. ‘A right rare dumping,’ Edna had called it. We were cut off, completely stranded for the best part of a week, the servants and me. And Mr Broughton had to walk five miles through the snow-covered fields to the village, to send a telegram to my parents. For the first few days normal routines and lessons were suspended, but conditions were so bad that Miss Greaves forbade me to venture outside. So I’d sat at the nursery window looking out upon that still, eerie landscape: the skeletal trees and frozen lake; the dark shapes of the deer moving slowly across the white parkland in the distance; and that low hanging sky, so full of snow it seemed to billow with the weight. Each evening I ate downstairs, in the kitchen, with Miss Greaves and the others. I was allowed to stay up late, and we song songs and hymns – with Miss Greaves at the piano – in the servants’ hall. And one night, terribly late, ready for bed and in my nightgown, Edna took my hand, led me through to the scullery, and then lifted me up on to the slate bench.

I stood there transfixed, watching tiny white crystals spiralling out of the blackness, sliding down the skylight above me. And when I turned to her, for her to lift me down, she wrapped her arms around me, kissed me and held me to her so tightly, and then she carried me all the way back to the servants’ hall just as though I were a baby, her own baby. I used to tell her all the time that I loved her, and I did.

I didn’t want the snow to melt, didn’t want things to return to normal. But as soon as my parents returned home, and despite more snow, everything changed. Evenings of song beyond the green baize door stopped, routines and order resumed, and even Miss Greaves appeared less than enthusiastic at the resumption of lessons on the nursery floor.

I can’t recall another winter as severe as that, and I certainly never again experienced the warmth of that
snowed-in
camaraderie,
but for a few weeks during January 1925 snow fell steadily over London. Frozen days gave way to nights of glistening, moonlit frosts. No number of blazing fires could keep us warm, and no number of clothes could stop us from shivering. And it was then, in the depths of that particularly hostile month that my brother Henry slipped further from us. It had been a gradual sink into the abyss, a slow dance into oblivion. The hedonistic mix of parties, pills and whisky, which had once alleviated his anguish, had become increasingly ineffective. And that keyhole in his memory, that small glinting light of who he’d once been, finally faded.

Unlike Charlie, who, despite his disability, had managed to pick up the pieces of his life, and had gained employment working at a city-based firm of solicitors, Henry was still without a job, and without any wife. He lived in a rented flat in Marylebone, spent his nights at bars and parties, and gambling, and his days sleeping. I don’t think he’d ever expected to have to work and, after the War ended, though he’d toyed with idea of staying in the army, and at one stage had even talked of going out to India, he’d slowly drifted into a malaise.

Henry had always been extravagant; it was part of him, his character. He’d been indulged, brought up to have certain standards, expectations, and he enjoyed life too much to embrace or understand any need for financial planning or frugality. He’d inherited some money, of course, after the sale of Deyning, but our home had been sold at the worst time, and for a ridiculous sum. And my father’s debts – coupled with taxes and death duties – had eroded my brother’s inheritance to no more than enough to live on adequately for a few years, not a lifetime. By that winter he’d run out of money and, it seemed, energy.

Mama was of independent means, with an income derived from a trust set up by her father for her and her siblings. But in the years immediately after the War that income had fallen,
and fallen dramatically. And, though entitled to some of the proceeds from the sale of Deyning, she’d forfeited her share in favour of Henry. She’d felt guilty about Henry’s
shabby inheritance
, and she said it would, at the very least, give him a start. But whatever monies Henry had received from the sale of our home had long gone and, more latterly, Mama had had to bail him out: paying off the arrears on his rent and clearing his gambling debts. She’d tried talking to him, told him that it couldn’t go on, that she couldn’t afford to fund his precarious lifestyle any longer. And I’d talked to him too, or I’d tried; but he’d stopped making sense, and appeared neither willing nor able to listen.

‘It’s not fair on Mama, Henry,’ I said. ‘She can’t be expected to support you now, at this stage . . . it’s simply not fair on her.’

We were sitting in my drawing room. He’d called on me unexpectedly, wanting money, telling me he’d be able to repay me in a few days. But he looked dreadful: pale, dishevelled and exhausted, his hair uncut and unwashed, his coat threadbare.

‘That’s why I’ve come to you,’ he said, running his hands through his hair. ‘And I hate myself for doing this to you, Issa, really I do . . .’

It was snowing outside, already dark. I noticed he was shivering, and I rose to my feet and placed another log upon the fire.

‘But I have no money, Henry. Nothing apart from the pin money Charlie gives me,’ I said, standing in front of the fire, my back to him.

‘I’ll pay you back in a few days, I promise. Anything . . . anything’s a help. I’ve just got myself rather stuck, you see.’

I turned to him. ‘But you’re always rather stuck, dear. And it can’t go on . . . you know that. You know Mama has limited funds now.’

He stared at the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know that. And I intend
to find myself a job, but I just need to sort a few things first.’

I walked out to the hallway table and picked up my purse.

‘I can only give you two pounds, I’m afraid. It’s all I have,’ I said, returning to the room. He was standing by the fireplace, his back to me, and when he turned to face me he looked so wretched.