Rutherford Park (27 page)

“But you have a job in the embassy. Surely you don’t need to go.” She looked away from him, fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief. “My father might be able to do something. Speak to someone.”

A faint smile came to his face. “Your faith in him is charming, but even your father has no jurisdiction over a French national.”

“You are laughing at me.”

“Not at all, not at all. You are an innocent, darling. It is what I love.”

She gazed at him. “I can’t see why there has to be a war. What is it to do with France? What is it to do with us?” She took a hitched, painful breath. He lifted her hand and kissed it. “We might…” She stopped nervously. “We have never been alone. Not really alone. We might go to a hotel.”

He remained where he was, eyes downcast, her hand still pressed to his mouth. Then he lowered it into her lap and looked up. “I could not do that.”

“But why not?”

“It would be wrong, dear. For you especially. But for us both.”

They looked out at the Long Water, and farther down to the curve of the Serpentine. A nursemaid walked by holding the hands of two small children; as they watched, the boy darted forward and picked up a stick and began to dance around the nurse and his sister, grinning, capering, pretending that his stick was a sword. A sort of coldness swept through Louisa, a premonition of stark horror.

“What will your mother do if you enlist?” she said softly. “You will have to leave her alone too.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Will she be frightened?”

He paused. “Yes, I think so,” he said eventually. “I have heard it said in the embassy that if war is declared, there will be a march on Paris. It will be an objective: take Paris and dominate Europe.”

“But it will be defended, surely.”

“We will try.”

Louisa shuddered despite the heat of the day. Not Maurice. She imagined him there in uniform, a gun in his hand, or a rifle.
Please, God, not Maurice.
Perhaps, like the little boy who was passing them
now, it would come to barricades and sticks and stones. “I wish I were a child again,” she said. “One never thought. There were no dangers then. Only games.”

“You were protected from them,” he observed. “But they were there.”

She looked at him sympathetically. He had confided in her how his mother had been abandoned by his father, and how she had never seen her husband again. He himself had no memory at all of him, Maurice had said. He had grown up so acutely aware of this absence, this loss. Louisa had thought of how her own father had been a constant presence; she had told Maurice so, and of how she suspected that she was his favorite; how he indulged her. She had seen envy cross Maurice’s face before it was replaced with sadness.

“Will you write to me?” Louisa asked.

“I don’t know if letters would reach you.”

There were people passing, but neither of them noticed this time as he put his arms around her. He kissed her forehead, her fingers. She wished that he would kiss her properly; she pressed against him. He moved away, back in his seat. Looking at his profile, she thought how lonely he must be, alone here in London, knowing no one, never invited to anything. He had rejected her pleas to come to the de Rays’ one evening, to be introduced; he seemed determined to live apart. In this, she felt unutterably sorry for him; she wanted to change that loneliness so much. When she had asked him about it, he had merely shrugged. “I have always had to make my own way,” he had told her. “And it seems that I always will.” It had pierced her to the core.

The clock that had chimed three now chimed the quarter hour through the trees. Florence would be coming back soon. He would be gone. The thought filled her with dread and panic. “I want to come with you,” she said. “I want to come to Paris.”

“No. Impossible.”

“It’s not impossible,” she said. “We could be married here in London. This week.”

“No,” he repeated. “It can’t be done.”

She stared at him. “Don’t you love me?”

“You know the answer to that. But it is not a matter of love. It is a matter of practicality.”

“But don’t you see? If we are not married we may never see each other. I would go home, and…” She stopped. The prospect of this for the first time was unbearable; she could never sit in Rutherford and live an empty life. She would rather die, and that was the truth of it. She would rather go to a foreign country. France was only across the Channel. Maurice had told her about his city; she wanted to be part of it. She wanted to be part of him. It seemed that centuries had passed since she had left home.

She looked at Maurice and knew she would be safe. Surely they would both be safe. He had been careful not to take advantage of her; it would not be any different if they were married. He might not have a fortune, she reasoned to herself. But he had honor.

“I can be with your mother,” she ventured. “We can wait together. She would be glad of a friend, surely?”

He considered her. “I think your own mother would prefer to see you more,” he said. “What is she going to say, Louisa?”

“Mother worries much more about Harry. He’s her favorite.”

“Nevertheless. A mother is close to her daughters. It would surely break her heart to lose you.”

“No,” she told him. “It might break Father’s heart, though.”

Maurice gazed into the middle distance, seeming to weigh this. “As for my mother,” he mused finally, “once you were there she would not want you to leave, it’s true. She would be most enchanted to see you.”

“You see?” she said. “How perfectly it would work? You mother needs someone with her. My mother has a husband, and Harry and Charlotte. She has all sorts of people around her. The servants too. But your mother is alone. We could wait together for you.”

“If Paris is invaded…”

“It won’t be invaded,” she declared. “And what could happen to us if it were? We shall all be together. I shall look after her, Maurice, I promise.” Louisa began to wring her hands. “I could be useful,” she said. “I haven’t ever been anything other than…well, you know…I’m sure everyone at home finds me amusing. I know Father does. Everyone else…Oh, well, Harry, you know, laughs at me….” Her voice trailed away. “I’m rather the comic turn. I don’t mind, but they think I can’t be trusted with a decision. Not even about whom I ought to marry. And I have the dreadful feeling that they shall marry me off, Maurice. I shall be installed somewhere in the back of beyond in a huge house, and that will be my life. And I can’t think…I can’t imagine…I would always think of you….”

“Your mother is right,” he said gently. “You must marry well.”

“But I would be marrying well,” she protested. “I can prove that to them. I would be marrying a good man.”

He regarded her for some time with something amounting to sorrow. “You have no idea what you are getting yourself into, I’m afraid. I am not a good man, Louisa.”

“Of course you are!”

He became very still, looking into her face. “There will come a time when you will think badly of me. That is the way of every love affair. And then you’ll be sorry that you have forfeited your huge house in…as you say, the back of beyond.”

She began to laugh. “And all the wet winters and the dozen dogs and cold rooms and the wind whistling over Norfolk and some
dreadful sweaty-handed man who has all the finesse of a…” The comparison evaded her. “Well, no finesse at all.” She straightened her back and gave him a broad smile of triumph. “I am coming to Paris with you,” she said. “We can be married there with your mother as a witness. Isn’t that fine? Isn’t it the solution?”

He turned away, looked back to the Long Water. “Your friend is coming back,” he said tonelessly.

“Maurice,” she pleaded. “Maurice, don’t leave me here.”

He looked back at her, shook his head slowly. “You want me to break your father’s heart,” he said. “You want me to do that.”

She was trembling; she did not know what else to say. She realized that she had somehow lost control of herself, but she could not help it. She thought that perhaps ever since she had seen him standing in front of the theater that night, she had lost her way. Rutherford assumed all the proportions and shades of a dream, rolling away from her, fading, disappearing.

“Please take me to Paris,” she murmured.

And by way of reply, Maurice Frederick suddenly grasped her hand.

H
arry stood in the crowds at the Yorkshire Show, clutching a copy of
Flight
magazine in his hand. It was the last week of July, and in contrast to the preceding weeks, the weather was rainy and overcast. Harry had bought
Flight
four months ago in London after the Aero Show at Olympia, and it had been in his pocket ever since, the turned pages now dog-eared and the print blurred from repeated reading. The grainy black-and-white photograph with the magazine article showed the new Blackburn monoplane, and now Harry was standing jammed in the crowds waiting for Blackburn himself, the builder and the pilot. Even when the rain began to get heavier—that slow, drifting Pennine rain—nothing altered the expectancy of the hundreds of men edging the wide lane.

Harry wanted to speak to Blackburn; he wanted to shake his hand. He looked down at the newspaper momentarily, an envious feeling in his gut. So many men already had a pilot’s license from the Royal Aero Club. He felt that the chance to fly was slipping away from him with every passing day. His father be damned; the
Blessington mills be damned. He had no interest in that or what his father supposed was best for him. Flying was what he wanted. If need be he would buy one of Blackburn’s Type 1s and be a passenger in it, just as Dr. Christie was. Christie had no license, but he flew with Blackburn all over the country. Last year the doctor had been in the Wars of the Roses race with Blackburn, easily beating the Lancastrian entry, an Avro biplane that, next to the Blackburn Type 1, looked like a Victorian grandmother fastened into her corset, all strings and whalebone and fabric. Next to it, the Type 1 was a beautiful twentieth-century bird. It had a sleek aluminum body and a near forty-foot wingspan, and the compartments had been edged comfortably with leather. It would be like sitting in a motorcar; the cockpit even had the steering wheel of a car.

Harry had wasted all year in London trying to erase that winter’s night at Rutherford. There had been girls—cheerful, bawdy, walking arm in arm with him home from East End pubs; there had been an artist’s model who had frightened the life out of him with her recklessness; and there had been two wives who had taken no luring, no lying, no payment, no seducing. They had been shut away in dead marriages, hungry for the kind of lovemaking he had to offer. Hungry too, as it turned out, for the tears he often shed. They would hold him to their breasts as if he were a child, until, suffocated, he was forced to break free. And he never knew how to do that properly. He would often step out into the dark feeling dejected and sick. To those who clung, he was cruel, he supposed. He simply never knew how to get away from them with any kind of grace, prizing off their fingers and slamming doors. He never had words. The tears came unbidden, and whatever depth of feeling they came from was unidentifiable, locked in a box somewhere. He told himself that he didn’t need to feel, that it could only make things worse. Instead, he had shouted louder and got drunk quicker and endured
more rooms and hands and clinging fingers and slaps and groans in an effort to drown out that echoing emptiness.

It was not as if he had not tried to occupy himself with other things. He had gone to the Anglo-American Exhibition at the Great White City, looking at the displays. He had hoped that it would inspire him to do something more than sit in White’s on St. James’s Street and stare at the women walking past. He had seen the working model of the Panama Canal, and the replica of New York City, and the scale model of the Grand Canyon. He had gone to the
Wild West Show
and watched the girls on their horses. Everyone had been talking about it, but he had found that nothing really moved him as much as the small out-of-focus photograph of the Type 1. That had got under his skin somehow, and sat there, itching to be scratched.

London had been killing him, killing the heart and soul inside him. Or what he had left of a heart and soul. He was, he found, desperately glad to be back in Yorkshire. He had had this sense of suffocation for so long. He had been choking to death, and all the noise—the screams, the sighs, the sound of his own feet running up or downstairs rattling on cheap boardinghouse floors, all the pandemonium of London streets, all the drunken yells, all the sounds of his own gasping sobs—had become so much unbearable noise. And just there out of reach—there as he woke, barely able to register her face, but feeling her in every pore—would be Emily, with the gold chain lying in the palm of her hand and a look of misery on her face.

The waiting now among the crowds began to irritate him. How long was it going to take? He had been here for an hour already. The plane had to be brought along the lane to the field, pulled by a team of men. It would be ungainly on the ground on its perambulator wheels, swaying from side to side. He had been told that
was how it looked: like a grounded swan unable to glide, its wings outstretched, or like a child’s arms trying to balance as it tried to walk. A stumbling progress. And yet it would be so different when it took off; then the swan became itself, a remarkable thing, an astonishing thing. The child ran; the bird flew. And he wanted to see it. He wanted to feel it. He wanted to be away from the ground.