Harry, England,
August 1914
F
OR THE LAST FEW DAYS,
he and Marina had been traveling just ahead of war—or running away, really, Harry thought—but at Abbotsgate they had come to a standstill while the war moved inexorably toward them, gathering speed. The British ultimatum had been sent and gone unanswered; at eleven o’clock this evening, there would be a formal declaration of hostilities. Politicians and military commanders were poised over their long-devised plans. Everybody knew it.
At Abbotsgate, time was briefly suspended. The rituals were observed: the obituary in
The Times
, a crowded funeral in the ancient church, the heartfelt obsequies: his father had been much liked, his death premature; but even back at the house, as they held their delicate cups of tea, the black-clad guests talked, quietly at first, of little else but the approaching conflict.
The Lord Lieutenant stood on the terrace, talking to Harry and a neighbor. “The local militia is ready,” said the Lord Lieutenant, “and there’s been a surge in recruits.”
“While we were in Paris we watched the French mobilization,” Harry said. “It was quite …”—he searched for a word—“… quite quick. And quite chilling.”
And it had been, in its simplicity. On every street corner, posters went up in hours. Men had left their jobs. Dinner was chaos with too few waiters; banks remained closed, despite the clamor of Parisians and foreigners at the doors, but the bank workers had gone. There were queues at recruitment offices, and men marching badly in their everyday working clothes, led by corporals in caps, red pantaloons, and blue jackets.
“It’s their territory that the Germans will invade within hours, of course,” said a neighboring landowner with connections to the government. “I imagine we British would be pretty keen to keep the Kaiser out of our country. And the French were humiliated by the Germans in living memory. But there’ll be a bill before parliament here in days. Recruitment. We’re not up to strength even with the territorials. The Germans have every man under forty-five in their reserves, every one of them trained as a soldier.”
He was blunt and weathered; even as a very young man, Harry had thought he was cleverer than he let on.
“You’ll stay?” the Lord Lieutenant said to Harry, and it was just barely a question.
“If there’s war?” Harry was surprised.
“To take over the estate. Your estate. But yes, to war too. Will you take a commission?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Harry said. It was not the entire truth: the possibility, vague enough not to be too unsettling, had crossed his mind when he was talking to Wilding. “Anyway, I doubt they’ll need me and I don’t think they’d want me. I’m not very young, I’ve been living in America a long time, my wife is American.”
“It depends on how many volunteers we get and how long the war goes on.”
In the word “volunteers,” Harry felt the slightest reproach. “Your father was a great cavalry officer in his youth, of course,” said their neighbor.
“He’d have been sorry to miss this fight,” said the Lord Lieutenant.
Harry looked for a way to deflect them both. “A friend of mine, a military man,” another half-lie, although Wilding was indubitably some kind of expert, “says it will be an infantry war.”
“Our cavalry and navy are the best in the world,” said the Lord Lieutenant.
Harry was going to speak, but then his neighbor said, more firmly, “And artillery can destroy a cavalry charge in minutes. But yes, we have our expensive dreadnoughts. If the war stays at sea.”
Marina and Teddy materialized at his side and the whole awkward conversation was diluted by their presence, although not before the Lord Lieutenant had said “My dear Lady Sydenham,” taking Marina’s hand and then holding it for slightly too long. “What a superb addition you and Harry will make to local society.”
The long day faded. It was exhausting, Harry thought, just responding to polite condolences, overhearing local gossip that meant nothing to him, or being taken back to his childhood by the well-meaning and the curious. He both longed for and dreaded their departure and being alone with his wife. All the time, Marina was perfect: kind, serious, interested. Again and again, friends of his father’s and their wives told him how lucky he was. She was the same to him. No more intimate than with the mass of strangers she was confronted with. Teddy was helping the cook, Marina said she wanted to lie down, and Harry wandered back to the church.
The family graves were together by the main door. His grandparents, a sister who had died in infancy, and his mother, her grave bordered in granite. A bunch of yellow roses had been laid on the plot. Under a weeping angel, the letters spelling out
Maude Alice Sydenham, 1855–1887
, were softening now. The lichen on the stone measured the distance since her death. Finally he stood by his father’s grave, the fresh, warm earth half disguised by a bank of already-weary wreaths. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was praying.
He felt as much as heard footsteps and looked up to see Isabelle. She was bareheaded, her wiry black hair loosely gathered at her neck. She came and stood next to him and was silent for a while. Looking down, he focused on her feet, the black stockings and buttoned shoes just visible below her dark hem.
Eventually she said “I’m sorry you had to return like this. But glad you could be here.”
“Did he really have no idea?”
“No. I would have said he was in good health and spirits. We planned a big party for his sixtieth birthday. With dancing.” She looked amused and sad all at once. “He was a little tired, perhaps, but then he wasn’t as young as he’d been.”
“Has Teddy taken it all right?”
She shrugged slightly. “Who knows with twelve-year-old boys?” She gave a small laugh. “But I think so, although he loved his father and brought him great happiness, I think.”
“Whereas I brought him nothing of the kind.” It was a statement, not a question, but she answered immediately.
“What do you want me to say? That it was all right? That he didn’t miss you, want to see you? That he understood?”
“No, of course not.”
“You were his heir,” she said. “His first-born. Of course he was sad. But it was superficially comprehensible, even admirable; you’d shown initiative, gone to America. It was the sort of life he might have dreamed of himself. And you wrote from time to time, to start with, anyway. . . .”
He flushed.
“But he knew you could come back. That was the hard part. To start with, he expected it would be in a year or two. But he always made excuses for you, even to himself, I think.”
“If you want me to feel guilty,” he said, “I can assure you that I do.”
She touched him briefly on the arm. “Don’t,” she said.
“You think it’s an indulgence to talk of guilt now?”
“I think it’s pointless.” After a further silence when she looked into the distance with her eyes screwed up against the setting sun, she said “I know about guilt, Harry, believe me. I lived with him for well over a decade. And you think I betrayed you, too.”
“It’s all history,” he said. “Ancient history. I expect you loved him—”
“No,” she said, her voice slightly raised. “I didn’t. Not at first, although I liked him very much. He was a good man, an amusing man, and, in time, especially when Teddy was born, I came to love him.”
“But you didn’t love me.”
“For heaven’s sake, you sound like a petulant boy. Yes, I loved you. But you were twenty; I was older than you.”
“By four years. Nothing.”
“I’d had a life by then,” she said. “I’d been married, widowed. Life was very difficult.”
He remembered how exotic he’d thought her difficulties. A woman with a past. Isabelle was an actress, classically trained in Paris. He’d been introduced to her by a friend who’d met her at an after-theatre supper party, and all three of them had spent a foolish afternoon in Hyde Park on the Serpentine, rowing in circles and noisily showing off for this woman of the world. They were both a bit scared of her, he thought, neither daring to see her alone. She always wore the same dress, with black dots on white and a blue sash, and it had never entered his head that this was because she had no money. Nor would she tell him exactly where she lived, waving her hand and laughing when the subject came up. Finally he’d followed her home from the theatre to a grim street. She was embarrassed, even injured, he thought, when he’d caught up with her. But she’d invited him in and he’d seen how she’d turned two tiny rooms into a retreat. A photograph of a man, evidently playing Hamlet, was, he assumed, her late husband. Another, less formal pose revealed him to have had a splendid moustache.
She had followed his glance. “He was ill for so long,” she said. “He didn’t look like that in his last year.”
She poured him a brandy, then sat on a footstool, and they had talked and talked. She had no close family—only a cousin who was another widow, “even poorer than I am, and she has a child to support, poor woman.”
When her current run at the Lyceum was finished, she would need to decide whether to return to France or not. It was entirely a financial matter. Then he’d thought, clumsy with youth, that he could give her money. His mother had left him a substantial sum, and it had been well invested.
Later, she’d read to him from Molière. She’d agreed he could return, and the next time he had read her Lord Tennyson’s
The Lady of Shalott
, and she’d clapped when he finished, and she had recited French sonnets from memory. The next time he arrived, she looked solemn. She took his hand—he remembered the marvelous feeling of her cool, soft fingers—and led him not to the usual chair but to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed as she very carefully removed her boots, her belt, her stockings, and then indicated that he should unhook her dress. It fell to her waist and she stepped out of its skirts. She looked at him, briefly, as if to check that what was happening was all right, then unlaced her chemise and folded every article carefully and with excruciating slowness, it had seemed to him. Finally she’d pulled two or three pins out of her hair. Naked, she was—like her dress—all contrast: very white and very dark. He had never seen anything so beautiful, or so thrilling, in his life.
She had given him a smile—not a confident one. “Do you like it?” she said.
And when she had finally helped him take his own clothes off—an everyday task at which he was suddenly all clumsiness—and pushed him down gently, she said, very politely, “You are a virgin.”
“No,” he’d lied. “Not really.”
As he explored her with delight and a desperate curiosity, he was astonished by how much pleasure he seemed to give her. He was nervous that it would all end too soon, but she guided him inside her almost immediately and seemed to encourage him to reach a climax, but then she held him and murmured “How I’ve missed this.” He supposed they slept a while before he felt her touching him and he took her again, much more in control but just as excited and amazed by her. She cried out in French as her thighs tightened around him, which he found unbearably arousing—she was somewhere else, in her own world—and that made their intimacy all the more thrilling. His face was buried in her hair and he kissed her, feeling that he wanted to become part of her.
Later she had gone to her tiny kitchen. He could hear her splashing herself with water. When she returned with a drink for him, she said “I miss my husband very much. You made me very happy.”
Now, a mature man, he realized that it had been a warning; but then he had had no idea that a woman might long for a man or that love might not be equal or straightforward, and he had just laughed in a sort of nervous relief. When he stood up, naked before her, he had echoed her words: “You like it?”
This time she had given him a broad smile, her cheeks dimpling, and nodded. When he was dressed, she put her hand over his. “Soon I shall go back to France,” she said.
“No. No!” he almost shouted. “Why?” He felt a sense of panic.
“Silly boy,” she said. “Because I need to work. There is a part possibly for me in Lyons. The theatre there is very good. If not, I have an offer—a less good part, it is true—in Paris.”
He was on the point of telling her he loved her and saying he could support her, but realized just in time the crassness of either comment. To offer his love as a reason for her to stay in poverty was an insult, and it would have been even more of an insult to offer her money when she’d just given herself to him. But eventually, he’d thought, as he walked back to Hyde Park, he would declare both of these things. He was filled with terror at the idea of her going and delirious with how she moved and smelled, and her appetite for him.
He’d invited her to Abbotsgate because she didn’t seem to have many friends. His father was unconventional in his friends and infinitely welcoming. It was, Harry sometimes thought, partly because he was bored in the country.
She hadn’t wanted to come at first. “Don’t be silly, Harry. Your father will think you intend to marry me and will have apoplexy.”
But he’d persuaded her by pointing out that she was about to leave England and, just as he’d seen her home, he wanted her to see his. And by asking three other friends, all of whom she knew. “See. Uneven numbers,” he’d said. “And my father will have friends down too. Probably dull ones, but you’ll enchant them.”
What he’d not considered was how potentially cruel it was to flaunt the vast inequality of their circumstances by taking her there; but if she was humiliated by this, she didn’t show it. She was, he thought later and ruefully, an actress. There was no question that she’d amused his father, and he remembered feeling proud that his father had taken a friend of his seriously. They’d ended the evening singing and playing the piano. At one point his father had played, rather badly, and Isabelle had sung, rather well, a French ballad,
“Auprès de ma blonde.”
After applause and some table-thumping, from his friends and from a visiting couple his father had met the year before in Baden-Baden, they had all sung songs from
The Pirates of Penzance
. At one point, Harry had thought that the four years Isabelle had on him made her seem closer to the married couple than to his younger friends, two of whom were now quite drunk.