Shortly after the wedding they had moved in with Archie and Mary Baines. Archie was a corporal in the same regiment as Michael and when the two men were sent off to France Mary and Clarissa became friends sharing the household chores and caring for Mary's four children. Clarissa had been frightened and horrified when she realised she was pregnant and convinced that she couldn't cope without Michael but the good-hearted Mary had reassured and cared for her until she came to terms with her condition and began to look forward to having Michael's child. Like thousands of other women, their world had come crashing down when Archie was killed and Mary, from whom strength had seemed to visibly ebb away, took her children and went to live with her mother. Totally unequipped to deal with a life of poverty on her own, Clarissa had found herself alone and living in a tiny basement slum.
Even sitting on the park bench in the sunshine so many years later, the memory of that dank and dark little room sent a cold shudder through Clarissa's body and she glanced at Alexander who was still staring at the house, but for him she would have surely died in that awful place.
Alexander too was thinking of that time. On leave at Christmas 1917 he had stopped off in London to visit Clarissa, his brother's wife, and was horrified by her living conditions, she looked ill and forlorn but he was unable to find her anywhere better to live. He was on his way to Durham to visit his mother but decided he must stay with Clarissa. He was with her on New Year's Eve when she received notification that Michael had been killed and, hysterical with grief, went into premature labour. He had managed to get her to a hospital and when told she and the baby might die had sent a note to the house at which he now stared at, asking Charles to come to the hospital.
The two men had disliked each other on sight and came to blows when they got into a fierce argument in the corridor of the hospital. Alexander smiled when he thought of their stupidity and the dragon of a midwife, Sister Nicholls, who had threatened them with expulsion from the hospital if they didn't behave themselves. The child, a boy, was eventually born, but both he and his mother were still in danger. As the two men left the hospital at midnight and 1918 dawned, they had shaken hands and declared a truce putting aside all previous antagonism in order to be there for Clarissa and her baby. Neither of them could know that they would become as close as brothers for the rest of their lives.
Alexander recalled how over-awed he had been the first time he set foot in the Petersen house that night, it had seemed like a palace. He and Charles got drunk and talked for hours about the war and its futility, they cried about Clarissa and her desperately ill son and the next day, having regained their composure, made plans to join forces for the future.
How young they had all been, but Alexander still remembered it vividly. What a night it was! A night filled with fear, hate and violence and yet from it had come peace, comfort, love and a lifetime of friendship for himself, for his mother and for Clarissa and Charles when they had willingly bound themselves together with a promise to care for one another and for Clarissa and Michael's son, Max.
Charles suddenly turned and looked at him, he had a half smile on his face and Alexander wondered if he too was mulling over the happenings of that very night.
Knowing that shortly they would both have to return to France, Alexander went north and brought his mother Eloise to London to care for Clarissa and her baby while they were gone. They were all grieving and weakened emotionally by the loss of Michael. Clarissa and her baby were still not out of danger but together they felt stronger and before Charles and Alexander went back to war the four of them, sitting around Clarrisa's sickbed, held hands and made a pact that whatever happened they would remain together forever and care for Michael's son.
At the war's end the men returned, Charles had a leg wound and would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and although Alexander's deeply invasive wounds were not visible it would be many years before he recovered. Life did begin again for them all, but it was a life built around each other and their duty to their young charge. Clarissa had named him after the four most important men in the family, his father first then she had drawn the other three names from a hat, Alexander, his brave uncle, Xavier, his grandfather and Charles, his gentle uncle, and thereafter, Michael, Alexander, Xavier, Charles, was commonly known as Max.
A chilly breeze roused them from their day-dreaming. “Time we were heading home,” Alexander said, standing up and taking one last look at the house and the church yard where his mother rested in peace. They had parked the car on the road at the front of the house and they walked towards it to begin their journey back to Hampshire. Clarissa looked up at the window of the bedroom that had once been hers then glanced to the corner of the terrace where Michael would wait in the shadows to make sure she got home safely after their secret meetings, even so many years later her heart leapt within her chest.
Charles got into the car and quickly switched on the ignition anxious to be away from the past and on the way home to the new life they had made for themselves in the picture postcard Hampshire village of Oak Hathern.
It was at Charles's insistence they had moved. He had used the excuse of how dangerous it would be living in the capital if the threatened second war with Germany began, but in truth after Eloise's death and Max's departure to university, he believed the three of them would wither and fossilise if they did not break free from the past. They were more in danger from their own introverted lifestyle than from war. The pact that had been such a support and saviour had suddenly felt like a ball and chain and threatened to stifle what was left of their lives. He had lost the love of his life because of the claustrophobic nature of their existence. Barbara Denby had brought joy, laughter and a breath of fresh air into the home, but she had left him when he found himself unable to move away from the others.
The move to Hampshire had been a success, they had suffered the uncertainties and deprivations of six years of war but this experience had expanded all their lives in one way or another. They had, at last, broken free and embraced the future. Even Charles's lost love Barbara had by some miracle come back into his life. Two more generations of the family now lived in Oak Hathern but still on days like this, the pact separated them from the others and drew these four together; they would never be truly free, they would always be âThe Quartet', the four who rose from the ashes of war, like Lazarus risen from death, to face the world together.
Chapter Two
Max Darrington was a young man studying at Oxford when his widowed mother, Clarissa, her brother Charles Petersen and her brother-in-law Alexander Darrington left the family home in London and bought a cottage in the beautiful Hampshire village of Oak Hathern. The village was so named after the huge oak trees that had flourished for generations on the village green. Top Cottage, as their home was called, may have been a cottage at one time but in 1939, when the family took up residence, it was a large house sitting at the end of a narrow, hilly road winding up from the village. It looked out over the chimneys of the dwellings below across the Hampshire Downs to the sea in the far distance.
Enjoying his first taste of independence, Max gave little thought to the reasons for the move. He assumed the impending war meant they would be safer out of London, or the recent death of his grandmother, and his departure to Oxford meant that the house was too big for the three people.
Max had grown up safe and happy in their company but knew little of how or why they had come to live together. His mother and Uncle Charles had lived in the large London house throughout their childhood but his grandmother Eloise and his Uncle Alexander were from the North of England and had lived in very poor circumstances until the death of his father Michael in the Great War, when they too moved to the house in London.
Charles and Alexander had formed the Darrington Peterson Housing Company building accommodation for the new middle classes that emerged after the First World War and it had been an extremely successful venture. Eloise and Clarissa had managed the house with great efficiently, cared lovingly for him, the fatherless child, and seemed to be devoted to one another. In fact, the whole household seemed to run happily with no hint of any past tensions. If, at times, there was an air of sadness about the two women, Max accepted that this was because his father had died, Eloise had lost her son and Clarissa, her husband. He was aware that Charles and Alexander had also fought in the war resulting in Charles walking with a permanent limp and obviously Alexander too had suffered, but there was little talk of what had actually happened to him.
They were a close family but none of the four adults made any attempt to have outside friendships and as a happy child with copious amounts of love and attention it was something that Max never thought to question. He knew nothing of the ties that bound them irrevocably together, of the devastation that had threatened to tear them apart when his father was killed or of the pact they had made to stay together and protect him.
Even in such isolation Max found nothing sad about his childhood home. Charles had schooled him in the gentlemanly pursuit of cricket and Alexander even taught him to box, much to the dismay of his grandmother and mother. His grandmother was French and probably his favourite person. They spent long hours together speaking in French and English as she told him stories of her wonderful, adventurous husband Xavier Darrington who had drowned in the sea while training to swim the English Channel and whom she said looked exactly like Max with the same dark red hair and dark blue eyes.
Eloise seemed to come alive when she spoke of Xavier whom she had married just two weeks after meeting him in Paris and for whom Max was named.
Max was eleven when Charles brought home a fun-loving young woman called Barbara Denby and he overheard whispered conversations as to whether or not the two would marry. Max idolised Barbara who played cricket with him and cheated outrageously, rode a bicycle with him perched precariously on the handlebars and laughed loudly and often; she taught him to do the Charleston and was the antithesis of his conservative grandmother and mother.
Quite suddenly everything changed and without any explanation Barbara never came to the house again. Charles was quiet and sad and other adults whispered with concern as to what they might do to help but eventually life went back to the way it had always been and Barbara was not spoken of. For once Max was not the focus of attention and no-one was aware of the effect Barbara's departure had on him but he was mystified and heartbroken; she was the first person outside the family he had loved and she left without even saying goodbye to him.
Some years later Eloise died suddenly on the same day that Max received word that he had won a place at Oxford University. They were all devastated at the loss of the tiny but indomitable woman who had been the mother of the family and although Max felt guilty about his feelings, he was relieved when it came time for him to leave; he was finding the intense suffering of his mother and uncles unbearable. He too was grieving for his grandmother, but they seemed to have mentally moved into a tight huddle that refused to release them or indeed allow him in.
The news that they were selling up the London house surprised Max but when he travelled to Oak Hathern for the odd weekend or end of term he noticed great changes in them all. The threatened war had started and having been awarded a Government contract, Charles and Alexander were working long hours to establish the new haulage company they had bought in Southampton. Clarissa looked stronger and younger than she had in London and was taking great pleasure in organizing the interior decoration of Top Cottage. He could sense was no longer the focus of their lives and was grateful to be free of the emotional burden.
War changed Max from boy to man. Deferring his time at Oxford, he joined the Royal Navy. His emotions fuelled by the stories of his grandmother's successful marriage, he met and hastily married Claudine Duvall, a beautiful French girl, who was pregnant with his son. The marriage was short-lived and when Claudine went to live in London while Max was at sea, his son Jules was left in the care of his uncles and his mother at Top Cottage.
Max had a âbad war' as the term was in those days. The ship on which he served as a junior officer was sunk and he was the only survivor picked up after hours drifting in the sea. He was suffering from shock and exposure and after a short spell in hospital returned home to Top Cottage depressed and traumatised. Only the time he spent with his young son seemed to make him happy but the rest of the family looked for and found, improvements in his physical and mental health. And then he disappeared. It was thirty-six hours before the family learned that he had been caught in an air-raid in Portsmouth and found wandering, scared and incoherent by an off-duty police officer Douglas Hood who took him to the hospital.
Max spent many weeks in hospital during which time he learned that Claudine had been killed in an air-raid and his lifeline became the hospital psychiatrist, Dr Leon Bauerman. Dr Bauerman was a Jewish refugee from Austria who, while trying to lay to rest his own demons, helped Max face up to his âsurvivor guilt' over the lost crew of his ship, the failure of his marriage and the death of Claudine.
Leon and Max bared their very souls to one another and in doing so became indelibly bound together. Leon used his own confessions as a bargaining tool to encourage Max to remember and relive his forgotten trauma, it was certainly not an accepted form of therapy and as Leon continued to treat the troubled young man the words âphysician heal thyself' crossed his mind frequently. He confessed to Max that he had escaped from Austria after getting into trouble with the virulently anti-Semitic authorities, leaving his wife and two young daughters to their fate. In turn, Max told of the hatred he had felt for Claudine for abandoning him and his son and that he thought he might have killed her when he went missing. He certainly knew things about her that he couldn't explain, like the fact that she had taken a French Naval Officer as a lover. In his most desperate moments, he hoped he had killed her and at other times that thought appalled him. In his mind, he had a vision of her making love to this man with the cross he had given to her swinging from her neck, but was this a memory of a fact, or a memory of his imaginings while he was mentally ill?