The Memory of Lost Senses (6 page)

Jack Staunton sat tugging at the grass, his head bent, listening to Annie. She was going on and on about a fair at Linford, saying what a ripping idea it would be for them all to go. It had been at the Whitsun fair, right there on the green, that Annie had been told she would be married before she reached twenty. She had been euphoric, over the moon, had spent all of the following week cogitating upon her future, that forthcoming marriage, and with whom it was likely to be.

“So where’s Ethne today?” Walter asked.

“Oh, probably at church,” Cecily replied.

He threw his head back and laughed.

“It’s not
that
funny, Walter.” She turned to him: “She may well be.”

He leaned closer. “Really?” he replied, looking into her eyes, “But you always make me laugh.”

Walter had been like this a lot recently: staring and intense. And it made her feel awkward, uncomfortable. Weeks before, at his twenty-first birthday, a little befuddled and bleary-eyed, he had pulled her close as he danced with her and said, “You know I have plans, Cecily Chadwick . . . plans for the future. I’m going to make something of my life. You wait and see.” She had said, of course, she wouldn’t expect otherwise. Because Walter had a brain, a very good brain, and it would be wasted at a post-office counter, she thought. “So don’t you go running off with anyone whilst I’m not looking,” he had added, smiling, half-joking. She had laughed. “I’m not planning on running off with anyone,” she replied, turning away from him, toward her mother’s watchful gaze.

Now, she could hear Annie telling Jack Staunton everything the fortune-teller had told her at the Whitsun fair. “. . . she said she saw the letters R and W, and a large stone-built house and lots of animals.”

“A farmer?” Jack suggested.

“Yes! You know, that’s exactly what I thought. It has to be, doesn’t it? But I can’t think of any farmers, not round here, with those initials . . .”

“Could be middle names.”

“Yes, or someone who’s going to take up a tenancy, because I’ve got almost another year yet, you see. He might not have arrived yet.”

“There’s that old duffer, Richard Wakeford,” Walter broke in. “He’s got a big stone-built butcher’s shop, no wife, and plenty of
dead
animals.”

“Ha-ha,” Annie replied, flicking a hand in her brother’s direction. “I seem to recall that you, Walter Gamben, weren’t quite so glib at the time, were you?”

“It’s bunkum, Annie. All of it.”

“Oh really? And I suppose that’s why you were so keen to know if your name had been mentioned in connection with a particular young lady—whose name I shan’t mention . . .”

Walter’s face reddened, and for a short while no one spoke.

When Cecily stood up, saying, “I should go now,” Walter and Jack simultaneously rose to their feet.

Walter said, “I can walk you home . . . if you want.”

“There’s no need. And anyway, I have my bicycle.”

Jack Staunton stood kicking a toe at the grass, his hands in his pockets. “I’ll walk with you,” he said. And then, looking at Walter, as though he might say something, object, he added, “After all, I’m going that way too.”

At first, without Annie and Walter there to chivvy things along, the atmosphere was awkward, and they walked in silence down the road. He had insisted on taking her bicycle, pushing it along between them.

He said, “Annie’s a jolly sort.”

Cecily smiled, nodded her head.

“And Walter,” he said, turning to look at her: “He seems like a nice chap.”

“Yes, he is, although . . .” She paused.

“Although?”

“He’s become a little . . . solemn of late. But he’s a very nice person. One of my favorite people.”

“I could see,” he said, looking away.

“Sonia says you’re going to university, to Cambridge.”

“Yes. I’ve been offered a place at Trinity.”

“How exciting.”

“I suppose it is. Yes . . . I suppose it is,” he said.

“So you’re here for the summer then?”

“Mm,” he said, pushing the bike along, lost in his thoughts.

“Well, you know a few folk here now,” she went on, wanting him to feel . . . What was it she wanted him to feel? At home, welcomed, part of the village? Yes, all of those things and more. She wanted him to feel happy. She wanted him to look forward, not back.

“You know Sonia,” she said, “and now you know Annie and Walter, and me.”

“Yes, it’s good to make new friends.”

When they reached the hill that led down to the huddle of the village, he stopped, stepped over the bike, turned to her and patted the seat behind him. “Come on, hop on.”

He stood upright on the pedals and she sat on the saddle, her hands behind her, clutching it, as they glided down the hill. As they swerved to the right, toward the ford, she felt the tilting of the bike and grabbed hold of his waist. “Not through the water!” she shouted, but their approach was too fast, and then they were in it, and through it.

He stopped the bike on the dirt track on the other side of the stream. “Sorry about that, I forgot about the ford,” he said, laughing.

“And I’d forgotten it’s almost dried up,” she replied, climbing from the bike, glancing along the path of the stream to the pool where watercress and forget-me-nots grew. The yellow water lilies were in full bloom, the air above thick with tiny white butterflies.

They continued up the track. He said, “I’m getting a motorcycle next week. I’ll take you out on it, if you’d like.”

“A motor bicycle? I don’t suppose my mother would allow me to go out on one of those.”

“Don’t ask her . . . don’t tell her. I shan’t go too fast, you know. I promise. Just a spin through the lanes, but only if you’d like to, of course,” he added, without turning to look at her.

When they reached the privet hedge they stopped. She took the bicycle from him. The rubber grips of the handlebar were warm and wet where his hands had been. He pushed his palm up over his forehead into his hair and said, “My God, it’s hot. Hard to believe we’re in England, eh?”

“Yes,” she said, though it wasn’t for her, because she had never been anywhere else.

He stepped away from her, to the other side of the track, staring out over the scattered rooftops, the straggling line of the village beneath them. Across the valley a hot-air balloon rose up above the trees and he raised his hand to his brow, watching it. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to do that? To go up into the sky, just float above the world,” he said, and she smiled. Because every summer, every time she had seen one of those huge colored balloons rise up over the hill, intermittently roaring, breathing fire, she had thought the very same thing.

“One day I’m going to fly,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the balloon.

“You mean go up in a flying machine?”

He turned to her. “Yes, why not? Geoffrey de Havilland’s already building himself another flying machine, as you call it, at the balloon factory at Farnborough. He’ll be taking it up sometime next year, I imagine. And you know, one day, one day soon enough, people will be flying all over the place in them, across mountains, land and seas, traveling the world through the air.” He smiled. “It’s a stunning thought, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure. I think a balloon’s far safer, and more sedate.” She moved the bicycle toward the open gate.

“If we only ever did what was safe we’d never learn anything, never have new experiences . . . never move forward. We have to take risks in order to progress. Science has, at the very least, taught us that much.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very scientific, and I simply can’t believe science has
all
the answers.”

He stood with his hands pushed deep into his pockets, looking downwards and kicking at the ground once more. He said, “No, well, you might be right . . . I don’t know anything really. I thought I did. In fact, up until quite recently I rather thought I knew it all. But things happen, inexplicable things that one never saw coming . . . that one couldn’t possibly have foreseen or anticipated, and then everything . . . everything goes back to the beginning. Right now, I’m probably as clueless as the day I was born.”

“Sometimes all of us, no matter what our circumstances, feel like that,” she offered, searching for something better. “I lost my father when I was very young, rather like you . . . but of course I still have my mother.” No, that wasn’t what she meant, not what she meant to say at all. “What I mean is . . .” She faltered, and he smiled.

“It’s all right, I know what you mean.”

Seconds later, when she turned her head, saw his white figure disappearing into a tunnel of shadows, it was all she could do to stop herself from dropping the bicycle to the ground and running after him.

Chapter Three

He says he thought it was her in the bed, and she simply stares at him, her breathing loud and fast—as though she has been running, running very fast, her chest rising and falling, her jaw clenched. She shakes her head and speaks quietly when she says, “It can’t happen . . . can’t happen again.” He laughs, turns to walk away and she reaches out, grabs hold of the back of his shirt, pulling on it and saying, “Do you hear me? I’m telling you now.” His fist glides through the air so smoothly, so swiftly, swiveling his body, almost lifting him off his feet, meeting the side of her face in a loud crack. Then he looks across the room at the girl sitting on the chair by the fire. And he raises his finger to her as a warning.

Cora sat alone, staring out toward the tops of pine trees. Had she needed a prompt, a visual reminder, they would have served her well, for she had stared at that very same image—a blur of darkest green against brilliant blue—many times before. But at that moment she saw no wooded hillside and no English sky; she saw only the blush of ancient stone, the sunlit ruins of a distant place. She saw the velvet contours of seven hills, a hundred steeples and domes and, beyond them, the windswept meadows where the land met the sky in an azure haze. And with this image came the remembrance of the weightlessness of youth, when her world had been a small empire of infinite possibility.

“Such plans, such dreams,” she whispered, “such promises.” Had it really only been a season? Yes, between autumn and spring. He had swept into her life without warning, turning winter into summer and her world upside down. But hadn’t she known, even before she met him, even before she set eyes on him? Wasn’t there something in the name, she thought, trying to remember that very first time she had heard it, which sounded . . . familiar, anticipated? She could hear her aunt say it, picture her standing in the hallway of their apartment in Rome. That was the beginning, she thought; that was when I came alive, truly came alive, when I heard that name for the first time.

Knowing he was in Rome for only the season made every minute of every hour of every day count. “It’s why and how I began to live . . .” She smiled as she recalled her boldness on that first solo visit to his studio, and she could see the place once more: the violets she took him, standing in the dirty jam jar; the canvases stacked up against the walls; the kettle on the open fire; the paper-strewn floor; and him, standing in his chalk-smeared, crumpled velvet jacket, holding up a teapot. “China or Darjeeling?”