The Summer Before the War (30 page)

“I ask only for you,” he said, wondering if she was really willing to join him in a serviced flat in the Old Brompton Road, or a small villa in the sort of distant suburb within the means of a young surgeon.

“Your integrity is one of your most endearing qualities, Hugh,” she said. “Not all men have it.” She frowned so seriously that he could not help but laugh at her.

“I can only hope you did not discover this truth on an omnibus?” he asked.

“Oh, Hugh!” she said, slapping him playfully. “This is why I adore you.”

He was surprised to find that instead of being devastated by her wish to delay everything a few more months, he felt strangely contented, if not slightly relieved, to continue just as they were. It was probably the war, he thought, inspiring people to hold on to the lives they already had. A brief image of laughing and dancing in a Sussex hop field flitted unbidden across his mind. He pushed it away and, for the next half an hour, was very earnest in paying attention as Lucy regaled him with stories of her much transformed London life.

After the bright of the sunny day outside, the gloom and fug of the small, black-beamed pub was almost impenetrable, the smell of frying liver and stale beer, the acrid catch in the throat from so many pipes and cigars. Students, law clerks, and tradesmen stood four deep at the copper bar, and Hugh pushed through with some difficulty to where his cousin and two friends were grouped close around a barrel table, eating pies with all the grace of dockworkers. Daniel was in his shirtsleeves, tie stuffed in his pocket, a dark stain of spilled liquor over his heart. A pint of beer and a glass of sticky whisky sat by his plate, and in the midst of loud debate, one of the men rose to his feet and refilled the whisky glasses to the brim.

“To poetry and to death!” he said, raising his glass and drinking it in one swallow.

“To poetry that transcends death!” said the other, downing his glass and slumping away from his plate.

“Above all to poetry!” said Daniel, and would have drunk, but Hugh reached to stay his arm.

“Hello, Cousin,” he said.

“Hu-Hugh,” said Daniel, having some difficulty with the
h
sound of his name. “You are just in time to toast the King. We are all going in the army!”

“The King!” said the friend with the bottle, raising the bottle itself and drinking from its neck.

“To King and country!” squeaked the other, unable to rise again from his seat.

“The King!” The pub erupted in cheers, and Hugh could not make himself heard amid a rousing chorus of “Land of Hope and Glory,” made mercifully short by the inability of all to remember more than four lines of the chorus. As the noise died away, Hugh perched on a low stool and asked a passing barmaid to bring him a steak and kidney pie.

“Anything for an officer, love,” she said, giving him a suggestive wink.

“Just the pie, no peas or gravy,” he added.

“Hugh, you will be very proud of me,” said Daniel. “My father will be proud. My friends, those that are left to me in this cruel world”—with this he pulled out his tie and wiped his eyes with it—“will be proud. We are off to war, Hugh. We are off—
all in the valley of death rode the five hundred
.”

“Six hundred,” said the friend trapped in his own chair.

“What, Tubby? This is my friend Tubby Archer, Hugh.”

“Six hundred—Light Brigade…six hundred,” said Tubby.

“Six hundred? Shit, that's a lot of horses,” said the other. He was now cradling the bottle as if it were a small child.

“Longshanks, my friend—it is indeed—that's a, tha's a…” Daniel could not speak for laughing, his mouth hanging open, his eyes streaming with tears.

“Landlord says keep it down a bit, will you, gents?” said the barmaid, squeezing through with a steaming pie for Hugh.

“Sorry,” said Hugh. “Perhaps you could bring a pot of coffee.”

“No, no, no!” said Daniel, waving a stern finger at Hugh. “We're off to enlist in His Majesty's army and we won't go sober.”

“No we won't go sober, if we go at all,”
sang the three friends.

“Sorry,” said Hugh again.

“Not to worry,” said the barmaid. “You let 'em holler all they want, poor dears. They'll be a lot more quiet when they wake up under the sergeant major.”

She gave Hugh another wink and squeezed away while Daniel moaned, “Come back, Peg o' my heart. I love you!”

The three friends subsided into a low, harmonic rendition of “Peg o' My Heart” with only a passing adherence to any particular key. At least they were quiet enough for Hugh to be able to take a few bites of his pie and a draft of strong beer. When they were finished, all three seemed maudlin and close to tears, a marginal improvement on drunk and loud.

“What's all this about enlisting?” said Hugh. “I thought you were rather the pacifist.”

“No, not a pacifist, just a poet,” said Daniel. “But the time has come, Cousin, the time has come to show the likes of some that real men, real bravery lies in the trenches.”

“Heading for the infantry, are you?” asked Hugh. He could not hide a smile at the thought of fastidious Daniel in a muddy trench.

“Longshanks here—this is Bill Longshanks from the Poet's Circle of Greater Pimlico—Longshanks has an uncle can get us in the Artists Rifles. Officer training. All poets and artists and so forth. No rich dilettantes, but only true artists on a mission to limn new forms of bravery and construct, with sonnet and brush, a new brotherhood of artist-soldiers.” He paused to peer in his beer tankard, and, finding it still half filled, he raised it high as if to toast. “We are away this very afternoon, my boys.”

“You should probably sober up. Things may seem different with a clear head.”

“No, no, I will hurl myself into the valley with the horses,” proclaimed Daniel. “No time to lose.”

“No horses,” said Longshanks. “Just rifles and so on. Probably go by train. Four o'clock from Kings Cross.”

“They need me, Hugh,” said Daniel. “They need an editor for the regimental journal.”

“I said Daniel Bookham is the man to write our history in epic verse,” said Longshanks.

“Even under the barrage I shall toil in my dugout by a single candle,” said Daniel. “And when the bugle sounds the end of day, and they pull our battered bodies from the carnage, they shall find me clutching to my breast the final issue…” He wiped a tear from his eye, and his friends, too, nodded their heads low and seemed to mourn already the destruction of the regiment.

“I think you're putting the cart before the horse, nonexistent as the horses may be,” said Hugh. “This is not a decision to be made in your cups.”

“It is the biggest adventure our age shall see,” said Longshanks, who did not seem quite as drunk as Hugh had first thought. “It is the ultimate canvas, and no second-raters invited!”

“Hear, hear,” chorused Daniel and Tubby Archer. Hugh understood, with a sinking feeling, that the whispering recruiters would resort to no end of stratagems; that flattery and insult, career prospects and love, family honor and the shining gold of opportunity would all serve equally well for the purpose of recruiting men to wear the khaki.

“I signed up, so I am the last to dissuade you,” said Hugh. “But I asked my father's permission and my mother's blessing before I did, and you, Cousin Daniel, will do the same, and best to warn Uncle John and Aunt Agatha as well, I think.”

“We could go tomorrow,” said Tubby. “Earlier train, you know—time to pack a hearty lunch and settle our affairs.”

“Tomorrow would do as well,” said Longshanks. “But I will telegraph my uncle today of our intent, and you will not, I know, make me a liar by any shirking?”

“But might Tubby's landlady not discover his purpose in the delay?” asked Daniel. “I thought he meant to leave via the back window.”

“I shall pack my brushes and leave via the front door,” said Tubby. “I shall inform the lady of my purpose in the gravest tone and promise her a pound of my flesh from the King's own pay.”

“Best we plan to have a hansom cab standing by,” said Daniel. “We might have to make a quick getaway.”

“I have time to take you to your father's house,” said Hugh to Daniel. “Or perhaps we can find him at his club?”

“No need of that,” said Daniel. “A note by the last post will do. My father will be nothing but ecstra-extar-ecstatic at the news.”

“Then I think we had better go and see Uncle John at the Ministry,” said Hugh. “I have a feeling you will need his help to tell Aunt Agatha that her favorite nephew is going to war.”

“I am not the favorite, you are the favorite,” said Daniel. He turned to his friends. “They think he is ever so clever with his science and his medicine, and I am just a poor penniless poet…”

“And I bet you can't say ‘poor penniless poet' three times without spitting beer at everyone,” said Hugh. “Let's be getting along now, Daniel.” Tucking a hand under his cousin's arm, and with much protestation from the friends and shouted arrangements that made no sense to anyone, Hugh pulled Daniel bodily from the public house and marched him at a half run in the direction of a bus to Whitehall.

The cottage of Algernon
Frith and Amberleigh de Witte was a low, thatched building standing amid the fields in a tangle of untended garden. Paint flaked on the green-painted windows, and the eaves and the plastered walls were grayish with mildew. The front gate hung open, green and rotten on its posts, and a bicycle lay carelessly toppled against the porch, where two large glazed pots, of the most intense blue, foamed with flowers in hues of Mediterranean red, pink, and orange. The cottage should have inspired only disdain for its tumbledown air, but instead Beatrice, approaching with Celeste along the narrow, grassy lane, found it strangely romantic. A girl appeared at the doorway and curtsied as they approached. “Come in, misses, if you please,” she said, a little breathless and wide-eyed, as if she were unused to guests. “Mistress is in the back garden.”

From the rough stones of a back hall, they emerged into a garden thick with shade from trees bent under the weight of ancient vines. Beneath a smothered pergola by the edge of a pond, Amberleigh de Witte reclined in a sagging wicker chaise, dressed in a loose green tea dress with her hair down over her left shoulder, tamed only by a narrow ribbon. She was writing in a large leather book and did not get up as Beatrice and Celeste approached but merely waved a long, thin hand and called out to them.

“Do come and have some tea. I've asked for champagne, but it's still chilling in the icehouse.” On a wooden table at her elbow, a tea urn hissed above its small burner, and a stack of old blue and white china teacups waited to be filled. A cake stand held an assortment of the usual small sandwiches and the plain rock cakes that were popular now that sugar was scarce. But a stoneware plate nearby held a glistening pork pie. And a bowl of what looked to be confit duck legs, furred with yellow fat, was propped on an old barrel and attended with rapt attention by a panting spaniel, whose nose came almost to the rim. Champagne glasses and a dark bottle of some unknown liquor completed the lavish, unconventional tea setting.

“It was very kind of you to invite us,” said Beatrice. The note, on pale blue stationery suffused with the smell of iris, had reiterated Amberleigh de Witte's hope that Beatrice might bring some of her writings. Such an overture from the prominent authoress was balm to Beatrice's bruised hopes, and she had spent much effort in picking over her meager stock of original poems and written sketches. Any whisper of hesitation, any thought that Agatha Kent might fault her for visiting a woman now as notorious as she was renowned, could not stand against the thrill of being asked to share her work.

“And I see you have brought some pages for me to read?” asked Amberleigh, setting aside her own book and pen and indicating the cardboard portfolio Beatrice clutched under one arm.

“I hardly dare to ask you,” said Beatrice, blushing at presenting the usual self-deprecations of the eager student to Amberleigh's all-piercing hazel eyes.

“I would much rather read your work than pen my own on such a lovely afternoon,” she replied, turning her head towards the lake to call out, “Johnny, Minnie, we have visitors.” With some surprise, Beatrice looked for an unexpected man, but across the pond she saw only Miss Finch, the photographer, crouched in a large bank of rushes. She wore a long linen coat and knee-length cycling bags tucked into boots. A large trilby hat shaded her head and her camera.

“Coming,” called Miss Finch, waving at them. “Just one more shot, Minnie. This time half a turn towards me.” Minnie Buttles now emerged from what Beatrice had assumed was a clump of weed and rose naked to her waist from the water. She draped herself partially in one end of a wet linen sheet that spread itself on the green surface. Her hair hung wet and loose down her back, and the crown of weedy fronds and blowsy roses tilted over her eyes.

“This is the last one, Johnny,” she called back. “This nymph of the spring is about to become a victim of pneumonia.”

“You know Miss Finch and Miss Buttles,” said Amberleigh, as casually as to suggest it was perfectly normal to have one's guests swim naked in one's pond in the middle of the afternoon. “Oh, do tip the cat off that chair and sit down,” she added, waving towards a collection of rather down-at-heel lawn chairs. “He knows he has to make way for guests.”

“I—we work together for Belgian Relief,” said Beatrice. As she tried to gently tip the thin gray cat onto the grass, she wondered at how little you really know the people you meet in the committee room. She could hardly believe that demure Minnie Buttles was in the pond before her, but she dared not look again to confirm. She concentrated on the cat, which spit and hissed as it ripped a claw free of the wicker and slunk away.

“And Mademoiselle Celeste, the princess from Belgium,” said Amberleigh, holding out a hand to Celeste. “How nice to see you again.”

“Thank you, madame. I am happy to be in your home.”

“You are quite exquisite. Miss Finch may want to take your picture too.”

“No, no I cannot. My father, he does not approve the photography,” said Celeste. “He thinks the photography, it destroy the art.”

“And what do you think?” asked Amberleigh.

“I do not have the—how you say?—opinions,” said Celeste. She sat down in a light blue chair, the arm of which had been repaired with a tight bandage of red knitting wool.

“A woman must always have an opinion,” said Amberleigh. “Perhaps no one will ask it, but we cannot be prevented from forming one.” Celeste seemed to take a moment to translate and digest before she replied in her careful English.

“Well, I was sad to leave behind the picture—
la peinture
—of my mother,” she said at last. “If I had a small photograph, perhaps I could have carried it in my heart.”

“Very well said, Miss Celeste,” said Amberleigh. “You have all the makings of a true bohemian.”

“I am not sure Celeste's father would approve of such an idea,” said Beatrice.

“Have we shocked you before the tea is poured, Miss Nash?” asked Amberleigh. “I should have warned you that we would be a garden of women.”

“The gardens of Sussex seem to hold an unexpected number of women
en déshabillé,
” said Beatrice, not to mention, she thought, those that preferred the occasional use of a man's name and trousers.

“C'est en toute innocence, je vous assure,”
said Amberleigh, smiling at Celeste. “My afternoons are merely a gathering place where women can rest, discuss, create—with no strictures of fashion or of society. We kick off our shoes and our corsets and enjoy the freedom of our private space.”

“Sort of like the Rational Dress Society?” asked Beatrice.

“Dear God, I hope none of us would be seen wearing such dull attire as they propose,” said Amberleigh. “Exchanging the limits of the corset for the invisibility of a hemp shift is hardly freedom.”

“I would like to take off my shoes,” said Celeste timidly. “My feet are hurting a little from walking through the lanes.”

“I'm so sorry, Celeste,” said Beatrice. It was a good three or four miles to Amberleigh's cottage, and Beatrice had tramped at her usual pace, making no allowance for Celeste walking in ill-fitting, donated shoes. As usual, she had been uncomplaining.

“Off with the shoes and stockings,” said Amberleigh. “You will find the mud in my pond as soothing to tired feet as any treatment imagined. It's the chalk, you know. Makes a wonderful poultice.”

“I'm not sure…” began Beatrice, but Celeste had already hitched her skirts into a froth around her thighs and was rolling the thick, dark stockings from her pale legs.

“By claiming a small space for ourselves, we can perhaps return to the innocence of our childhood,” said Amberleigh. “And through the lens of innocence we can begin to glimpse something true. You must recognize the creative possibilities, Miss Nash?”

“I suppose so,” said Beatrice, but the doubt in her voice forced her to be truthful. “My father taught me to imagine the arts as the highest form of human endeavor, a distillation beyond mere education and erudition. Not some primal product of muddy toes or…” She stopped before she might say something to offend.

Amberleigh let out a peal of laughter. “Or of drinking in the afternoon,” she said as the serving girl approached with a wooden bucket from which peeked several bottles and a large lump of ice. “I assure you, dear Miss Nash, that champagne is quite the muse if approached with the proper air of worship.”

“Do pour me some tea before I catch my death of cold,” said Minnie, who had left her pond kingdom and now appeared dressed in a loose wrapper and swathed toga-style in a thick blanket. She was smoking a cigarette in a short ivory holder. “I sometimes think it would be quicker for Johnny to paint me than to wait for the photograph.”

“Have some champagne?” asked Amberleigh.

“No, no,” said Minnie. “It makes me sleepy and— I say, Miss Celeste would make a fine subject for Johnny just now, wouldn't she?”

Celeste was tiptoeing on the edge of the pond, squishing the moss and mud between her toes, all her skirts clutched in a ball around her knees. She bent to peer at a large water bug, suspended on the surface by its wide feet, and her reflection in the water arced towards her.

“No photographs, please,” said Beatrice sharply. “I am bound to look out for Celeste's respectability.” As she finished, Minnie's cheeks began to turn red.

“I'm sorry,” said Beatrice. “I just meant she is very young and her father is very old-fashioned.”

“So is Minnie's father, the Vicar,” said Alice Finch, setting down her camera and wooden tripod carefully behind Amberleigh's chaise. “And yet, as I told him, art must be made. And should it be made on the back of some poor girl willing to trade her reputation for bread, or should we be our own models and be willing to appear in the art we will hang above our mantels?”

“But you do not appear,” said Beatrice.

“Believe me, we have tried,” said Miss Finch, as Minnie smiled. “It turns out I do not have a face the camera can love. My Diana the Huntress—well, I could have been the frontispiece for a builder's catalog. So in all our constructions of beauty, I stay behind the lens and Minnie shines in front.”

“We are very careful as to which art might be published,” said Minnie. “I am a vicar's daughter, not some shade of the demimonde.”

“I'm sorry I implied disapproval,” said Beatrice. “I am more used to writers than to artists. Please forgive me.”

“Drink some champagne and we'll forgive you,” said Amberleigh.

“Just tea for Celeste and me, thank you,” said Beatrice.

“You writers are just as quick as artists to exploit your characters in ways you would never behave yourselves,” said Miss Finch. “Then you judge them harshly and cast them into the pit to the delight of your oh-so-respectable readers.”

“I think I am in about as dire a strait as any I have inflicted upon my characters,” said Amberleigh.

“It will blow over in time,” said Minnie. “And meanwhile your friends are glad to have you to ourselves in the country.”

“It appears we do not have as many friends as I thought, dear Minnie,” said Amberleigh, producing a note from her pocket and looking it over. “Agatha Kent writes to excuse herself from our afternoon tea. She is so busy with relieving the Belgians, she says, that she must deny herself the pleasure and also suffer the shame of being unable to reciprocate in the foreseeable future.”

“I had thought better of her,” said Minnie. Beatrice said nothing, but as she looked at Celeste, drinking tea in her bare feet, a small flicker of concern licked at the edges of her happiness. She would have come to tea at all cost, but now she wished she had made some excuse not to bring Celeste.

“It was Tillingham and Mrs. Kent who arranged for us to rent this house,” said Amberleigh. “I had hoped that meant I would find a welcome in their small town, but it appears the gates are barred.”