The Wild Dark Flowers (9 page)

“God help us,” Mary muttered. She looked pityingly at the boy’s gangly, dirty shape, the string around his waist holding up his trousers, and a thick misshapen knitted coat on his back. A cap was positioned far back on his too-large head. He turned, and grinned at her and began to sing “
There’s a silver lining through the dark clouds shining . . 
.”

“They don’t want daft folks. Get along with you,” she shouted.

He took no notice of her, just kept stamping up and down with his makeshift rifle. Eventually, he went to the archway through to the kitchen garden and there he half kneeled down, pretending to shoot at an enemy among the bean sticks and mounded potato rows.

“Ay-up,” he yelled. “I got yer, dirty German, dirty German! I got you proper dead, I did!”

And all the while, watching him, Mary was thinking,
not Alfie, please. Not Alfie.

D
onald Harrison was as far away from Rutherford as he could possibly be, and he was very glad of it.

Not in miles. No, not that. Not as far from home as some who wore the uniform of the Allies. But as they sat in the open coal carts of the makeshift troop transport—these slow-rumbling tracks had once served the coal mines that were close by in the French countryside—he had heard Canadian voices, and he had seen colonial troops. He hadn’t come as far as they had, across vast oceans, to fight here. But he had traveled through solar systems in his head, and he was still flying, still hurtling away from his past.

The Canadians had told him where they’d been born—places with odd-sounding names like Saskatchewan—and he’d been asked his. “Yorkshire?” one had queried. “What are you doing in a London regiment, then?”

“Running away,” he’d told them. They had laughed. But it was true.

He’d run away from one world, and fetched up in this one, and he was grateful for it. All around him, men talked about working in docks, on roads, on farms; sweating through their days, going hungry. Sometimes he heard a man say that he had been in a store, or had been a salesman, or in a bank; but for the most part they were just poor. Desperately poor. He never told them what he had done, back there in the faraway other world. “Footman,” would be like admitting to being a jumped-up lackey, a groveler, a fairy boy. No, he had kept his mouth shut. No one pressed him on it. No one cared.

On the ship across the Channel, Harrison had been standing behind a rail when he overheard an officer saying that all the London volunteers were “rats that ran out of the slums for something to eat.” But Harrison didn’t bear a grudge. The man had been right, standing up there with his swagger stick tucked under his arm. Right about them all as they had trudged past at Le Havre, straight off the boat: they were all wily hard-faced men relishing the fine adventure of war, and—rats or no rats—he was proud to be one of them.

Next to him in line had been a Cockney who claimed he was eighteen, although he looked much younger. He swore and shrugged and coughed and giggled; he couldn’t finish a sentence without obscenities. Harrison had watched him admiringly. Rats swam in sewers and came up stronger than ever. They bit and fought and fled. This boy alongside him would live if he could, and spit in the Kaiser’s eye. He was someone to keep near, to copy, to follow, young as he was, a boy who had been dragged up in a tenement near the East India Docks. He’d asked the boy what he would do if faced with a German. “Piss in his sauerkraut,” had been the cheerful answer. “Wear ’is bollocks on a fine Sunday ’at.” He’d stuck out his hand. “Ned Billings.”

They had been left there in the French port for twelve hours, and they had all put their packs down on the cobbled street, and after a while they had slept, slumped in disorganized piles. Harrison had stretched out among them all and felt relaxed and happy. He had just wanted to be free of it all, free of his old self, and he had left Rutherford as soon as war had been declared; not going to Catterick or Carlisle or York as he had hinted to Bradfield, but straight on to the London train. He knew London from working there whenever Lord William was in London, knew it like the back of his hand.

He had gone to Finsbury Square; there was a recruiting booth there. Volunteers had been arriving in droves, packing the pavements, clogging the streets. He had been given a cursory examination; they made sure that he was over five three—that was all that really mattered. He was asked his age and occupation. “Twenty-seven.” That had been the truth. And his job? “Laborer.” A mild lie. His smooth hands would have given him away if they’d bothered to look. But what did it matter? The army needed him.

He had gone straight into training in the first week of September and was billeted out to a reluctant woman whose husband had left her and who consequently had three empty bedrooms in the little Edwardian villa on a quiet village street in the middle of nowhere forty miles outside London. She’d had no choice. The men had descended on the Hertfordshire countryside, and they were the rat army. Tommy rats. Jolly Tommy rats. It was grand; he loved it. Leapfrogging through the stubble-rough fields; running, marching. Tearing up the same fields by digging practice trenches. Day after day, charging about with a bayonet and, screaming at the top of his voice, sticking it to a sack.

They were sent next to manoeuvres at Salisbury, and then had gone to a proper camp. The army had got itself more organized by then. They all had full uniforms for one thing. They all got three square meals a day, even a Christmas Day meal, sat down under canvas at long tables with paper tablecloths and steaming plates of a fat-rimmed roast. The catering corps had served them. He had thought it was bloody marvelous. Served at table! Him, who had stood for all of his working life to serve others who never noticed him.

Now and then he wrote to Jenny back at Rutherford. The others wrote to their sweethearts, so he pretended that he had one in Jenny. Skinny Jenny, not a scrap of meat on her. Blushing Jenny. He really had no idea what she thought of him, but she was a nice memory; something to hold on to, the memory of that palely timid girl.

The day after disembarking at Le Havre, the regiment had walked for twelve miles until they had come to a barn where they had camped out. The next day, another twelve miles, and the next. And then finally to the station in the middle of rolling fields where they had waited for the coal trucks to transport them. They were all joking and singing all the time. In good voice, in good humor. Singing rats, grinning from ear to ear, and waving their tin hats in the air when a photograph was taken. “That’ll be in the
Illustrated News
,” the photographer had told them. “Jolly picture for the ladies and gentlemen at home.”

Harrison let himself roll now with the motion of the truck, jammed between other bodies, stepped on by other feet, jostled, smirked at, pushed and pulled. Ladies and gentlemen back home. Yes, he knew all about the ladies and gentlemen. In that world, he had stood for hundreds of hours in a starch-pressed uniform and watched the dinners and parties. He had listened many times to Lord Cavendish expound his theories of the working man; heard him talk about
the lower classes
as if they were, at best, a kind of devoted dog to the landowner, the man stuffed into a suit, the man who permanently looked down from his lofty heights. The ladies and gentlemen of England. Donald Harrison laughed to himself. Cavendish wasn’t malicious, he wasn’t unkind; but he knew nothing. He imagined he was sitting on the top of a tree that would never fall. But you could feel it falling, Harrison thought. Oh, yes. It would fall, all right. He had no doubt about that.

Along the line, he saw half a dozen soldiers leap off the train and run into an unfenced orchard, and come back with apples that they began throwing into the slowly moving trucks. Hands reached up to grab them; a yell of triumph went up, a cheer. Harrison joined in, and caught an apple when it came. He surveyed it lazily, seeing that it was tiny and sour; attached to the same little branch were the faded brown residues of blossom.

He tore the old blossom away, pressed the fruit to his face, and smelled its beautiful scent.

*   *   *

I
n all his travels, John Gould had perfected one art. He had learned to stand still.

It came in useful, particularly in a place like Pier 54 in New York. The noise here was deafening, but he managed to tune it out. He managed to persuade himself that he was not in the Customs Hall, but on the beach before dawn as he had been four days ago.

He was barefoot, he told himself; and a warm, fresh wind was blowing across Cape Cod Bay. He was standing just below the new house, and, if he had turned back to look, he might have been able to see its white shutters and long veranda and the cedar-clad walls above with their short line of windows.

He liked to stand on the beach and look at the house now that it was almost finished. He liked to see the shingle roof. He was proud of its modesty. He could have afforded something big and broad and four-storied, something more like a hotel than a house, but that was not what he wanted for Octavia. He wanted a plain place with a white sand path to the beach.

The sand and the water were important, because the very first thing that they would do when she came here would be to take off their shoes and run down to the shore through the grassy dunes. She had always said that her husband did not like her to walk barefoot at Rutherford—that it was not dignified. But she would do it here—she would go barefoot all day if she wanted. He could still remember the shock of seeing her naked feet that first day in Rutherford’s impressive library; the feet peeping from under the elaborate lace hem of the morning dress. The way her hair was dropping from a loose chignon. He remembered everything. He always would.

He often traveled out from New York onto the Cape to see how the house was progressing, and he would camp out there when the builders had gone home. He brought a little truckle bed and positioned it in the one room that ran along most of the front of the house, where he had designed huge windows and French doors at intervals. He would lie at night looking at the colors over the sea, and the stars, and the racing clouds; he had seen winter and spring here, and now it was coming on to summer when visitors would come to the Cape. He had bought a huge stretch of coast here, but he would still soon start to see sailboats marring his piece of sea.

He wished she would come. It was an idle dream, and barely probable, but he still allowed himself to imagine. He would get a letter someday. Perhaps a telegram.
I’m boarding at Liverpool
, it would say. Or she would surprise him even more. She would arrive with one of his own letters in her hand; he would look up and see her getting out of a car at the front of the house, with that small smile on her face.
I’m here, John
, she would say.
Why did you ever doubt it?

Lying alone in the empty unfurnished shell of the house, the sound of the wind picking at the wood boards, thinking of her, was the closest he ever came to crying. He tried not to do it, though. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of crying—he wasn’t one of those men—in fact, he wept easily. His father was the same, “a dynasty of blubberers” his mother fondly called them—they were all the same. Softhearted, impetuous, restless, interested and interesting. Intrigued by the human race. Vociferous and talkative and funny. Oh, Lord, it was months since he’d really found himself able to be genuinely humorous. He’d lost it somewhere in the mid-Atlantic when he was sailing back to the USA after Octavia had decided to stay with William after the debacle with their daughter.

He’d left her at the railway station in York, and he had straightaway got a train across the Pennines and went straight to Liverpool and got on a boat, almost at a run. Almost without stopping, without thinking. Because if he had thought about it, he might have thrown himself in the Mersey, or over the side as the liner churned its way westwards. He’d tried to obliterate her, and he half succeeded until he got home and spoke to his father.

He recalled every word of that conversation.

It was late summer. New York had been hot. He arrived that afternoon weary and travel-creased and with a crooked, beaten smile on his face. As soon as his father had seen that expression, he grabbed his son’s arm and pushed him into the study, and shut the door behind them.

“You might as well tell me the whole story,” he’d said.

Oscar Gould was a practical man. He was comical, too. All his life, John had heard his father’s stories, and understood that the world was a strange and moving and ridiculous place, and that he was fortunate to live in the best city in the world and mix with the best people in the world. Oscar Gould was rich, but he was, unusually for a wealthy man, happy. He had taught his sons and daughters to be charitable towards their fellow man, and told them that everyone had their good qualities.

But his face had darkened when John confessed that he had fallen in love with a married woman. “This is the one you kept mentioning?” he’d asked.

“Yes.”

“Married to a title, John?”

“Yes.”

“Good God above.” His father had turned his back and looked out the window for quite some time. The city beyond the glass rushed and thundered, but there was silence in the room. And then he turned back. “That’s no good, Son,” he had said. “That can’t be.”

“I know it’s no good. I have to mend it somehow. I want to build a house for her on the Cape. She can’t be in one place and me in another.”

His father had flailed his arms in a gesture of helpless frustration. “I don’t mean that!” he exclaimed. “Man alive, boy, what’s got into you? I mean it’s no good to be involved with her at all. Not in any shape or fashion.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You can. You will.” He sat down at John’s side. “You did right to come back.”

John gazed at him. “You want to know the truth?” he said slowly. “I can’t be anywhere and feel alive. I thought I would. I hoped when I got home I’d feel different. But it’s not going to change. It was bad enough on the ship, but as soon as I put my foot in the door, I knew for sure. I’d hoped that I’d see the street and the house and put my key in the door, and see Tilly there in the hallway waiting to take my coat. . . . I thought I’d crash back to earth. I thought that. I hoped for it. But evidently it’s not going to happen.”