No Angel (Spoils of Time 01) (34 page)

‘That’s a matter for debate I’d say.’

‘Oh LM, do stop it,’ said Celia wearily.

‘Sorry. Let me have a look. What are they about?’

‘Oh – what I’d call landscapes. There’s one about the skyline in New York, being like – what was it – oh, yes, ‘petrified poplars’. I like that don’t you? And people are much more sympathetic towards the Americans at the moment, now they’re fighting for us. Anyway, I won’t do anything if you don’t agree.’

‘No, no,’ said LM, ‘you go ahead. Robert will be terribly pleased. And poetry isn’t something I can make a judgement on anyway. Heavens it’s cold.’

‘Not as cold as it is out in France, I daresay,’ said Celia sombrely.

Dear Mum,

Worse thing now is the cold. We work nighttime quite a lot which makes it worse. Being moved up to the line and so on, so Fritz doesn’t see us. All in our gas masks, horses included, they don’t like it at all. A cup of tea ices over in a minute . . . And the poor horses get frozen into the mud where they stand. It’s not much fun sometimes, but we’re quite cheerful and looking forward to Christmas. Keep your fingers crossed I’ll be home.

Love to all, don’t worry about me,

Frank

Frank did not come home for Christmas; but Oliver did. Gaunt, pale, exhausted, full of anger at what was being endured.

‘Passchendaele will go down as one of the most dreadful and disgraceful episodes in the history not just of this war, but of all wars. I tell you, Celia, the men are beginning to hate the armchair generals as they call them. They suspect, quite rightly in my opinion, that a lot of the time they don’t know what they’re doing. I’d like to put Haig down in the mud for a week, I can tell you. Those frightful letters he writes to the troops: the boys take a very dim view of them, talking about the need for self-sacrifice and so on. We had quite a few deserters after Passchendaele, you know, and who could blame them. Poor chaps.’

‘What happened to them?’ asked Celia.

‘Oh – caught and shot, most of them. Boys, they are, no more than boys.’

He was often morose, frequently angry; but she comforted herself that at least he was talking to her more. On the other hand, he did not even attempt to make love to her.

Christmas at Ashingham in 1917 was a surprisingly cheerful affair; not only all the Lyttons were there, but several Beckenhams as well, two of the boys as Lady Beckenham still called her sons, and Caroline, all with their children. There were some empty places of course, Caroline’s husband and one of Henry’s sons were both in France and so was one of the girls, nursing with the Red Cross, but the family had been lucky, had endured no casualties.

‘Yet,’ said Caroline, touching the table and closing her eyes briefly: Celia joined her in her silent prayer.

Jack was not home this year: ‘Had a bit of luck,’ he wrote to Celia, ‘been made up to full Colonel, invited to one of the chateaux with the generals for Christmas. I’ll try and rob the cellar to stock up Oliver’s. Best love, thanks again for the last leave, it was marvellous. Jack.’

‘He stayed with you, did he?’ asked Oliver when she showed him the letter.

‘Yes,’ said Celia, ‘he did. We went out on the town one night, it was indeed marvellous.’

‘He’s always had a bit of a soft spot for you,’ said Oliver, smiling at her. His attitude towards Jack was so indulgent that Celia knew if she’d told him Jack had tried to seduce her, he would never have believed it.

Christmas lunch was comparatively lavish: two geese, and several only slightly tough chickens – they had to be kept into old age these days on egg-laying duty and Lady Beckenham had made two deliciously rich and alcoholic puddings.

‘There wasn’t really enough fruit, so I added extra suet and a lot more brandy. You’d have had a fit, Beckenham, literally pouring it in I was.’

She liked making Christmas puddings, it was part of the family tradition and before the war this had been the only time in the entire year she visited the kitchens; now she did rather more.

To Barty’s intense joy, Billy joined them: not for lunch, but for the tenants’ Christmas tea, presents and carol singing in the great hall at Ashingham. Afterwards Lady Beckenham took him to the grooms’ quarters over the stables, insisting he could manage the steps, and producing an old crutch which had belonged to her grandfather.

‘Come along, now, you can do it. You can do anything if you want to – there now, you see. Perfectly all right.’

He and Barty spent the rest of the evening there with the two girls, until he had to go back to the nursing home for the night. He was still in a lot of pain but the further surgery had been pronounced successful and the wound was healing well.

‘Doctor says I should be able to have an artificial leg,’ he said to Barty, ‘might even get me job back, in that case. You never know.’

Barty agreed that indeed you didn’t.

‘Well,’ said Oliver, mellowed into something approaching cheerfulness by the best part of a bottle of port that he and his father-in-law had shared after dinner, ‘well, let’s hope and pray that this is the last Christmas of the war.’

‘Do you really think that’s likely?’ asked LM.

‘I think it’s possible. In spite of everything, I do believe the tide has turned. We’ve had some genuine victories at last, rather than just gaining the odd inch of mud; we owe a great deal to the Australians, they’re a fine bunch of men, and the Americans of course. You must show me your letters from Robert, LM. I’d like to read them. God, I wonder when we’ll see each other again.’

Robert and Maud spent Christmas Day with the Brewers:

‘You can’t be on your own in that house,’ John Brewer had said, after Jamie announced, flushed with distress, that he was to go to friends of Laurence’s.

‘I don’t actually know them very well,’ he said, ‘but Laurence seems to think it will be fun.’

Clearly he didn’t know them at all and it was unlikely to be fun: fun in any case was not a concept with which Laurence was over-familiar. But Robert smiled at him, told him he was sure he’d have a great day, although they would miss him, and spent the next hour trying to console Maud, who had been planning her Christmas with Jamie for weeks and had lovingly wrapped at least half a dozen presents for him already.

‘We’ll have a good day,’ John said, ‘Kyle’s here and Felicity’s sister and brother-in-law, and their two, and besides, we have to drink a toast to Felicity and her literary success. Your sister seems confident that several of her poems will be published. It’s so marvellous. I’m so very proud of her.’

Robert liked Felicity Brewer; she was a pretty woman, with a mass of golden-brown hair, large, rather pale blue eyes, and a gentle manner, which concealed the fact that she was steely and extremely determined. She was from a very old Boston family, her grandfather had been a general in the Civil War, her father was a most distinguished and successful lawyer, her mother was one of the queens of the New York charity circuit, and Felicity herself had grown up in a large house in East Hampton, been educated by a private governess, presented both at the Junior Assemblies and the Junior League Ball, the mark of a truly successful social season, and had been unarguably debutante of her year. Her family had not been exactly thrilled when she had fallen in love with the impoverished, if charming, John Brewer; but her father who had a shrewd eye for a good man and a promising investment, had given his permission and had never regretted it. Robert found interesting echoes in this of Oliver’s marriage to Celia.

Kyle Brewer, their eldest son, looked exactly like his father, indeed was rather more handsome, but took after his mother in other ways. He had a rather greater interest in music and literature than in bricks and mortar; he had graduated in English literature from Yale the previous summer and was now desperately trying to persuade himself that the attractions of moving into Lytton Brewer as heir apparent to the company could really outweigh a career in journalism or something like it. Even publishing.

It was a very difficult decision; his father told him almost daily that he did hope he would join the firm, how lucky he was and what a great future he had in front of him; Kyle told him almost daily that he wasn’t sure if real estate was for him, and that he wanted to explore other options. His father, in some exasperation, had now given him three months to make up his mind and embarrassed Kyle dreadfully over prelunch drinks by suggesting that if he didn’t join Lytton Brewer, perhaps he could join the other Lytton firm at the opposite end of Manhattan.

‘I’d love to think he could,’ said Robert, ‘but as you know, John, that firm is nothing to do with me. It was Jeanette’s baby, and now, of course, Laurence has a large interest in it. Which means my own influence is nil. But perhaps when Felicity is published in London, she could talk to Oliver about it.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of bothering Mr Lytton,’ said Kyle, ‘please don’t even think about it any more. And let’s talk about something else,’ he added, glaring at his father.

‘Like playing clumps?’ said Maud hopefully. Jamie had taught her clumps during the last few weeks, and she had been hoping for a game on Christmas Day.

‘What’s clumps?’ asked Felicity, intrigued.

‘Oh, well, you’re in two teams and you’re both given something to draw, and the other people in your team have to race to guess what it is. It’s so much fun,’ she added.

‘It sounds wonderful,’ said Felicity, ‘we’ll play it after lunch. Right now we’d better go in, or Cook will have a tantrum. She’s dying to serve ours and then get home.’

‘Then come along,’ said Robert, smiling at her. ‘Nothing could spoil Christmas more quickly, in my opinion, than a tantrumming cook.’

The day was a great success and Maud told her father at the end of it that she thought she would like to marry Kyle Brewer.

‘He’s so handsome and so good at drawing.’

‘Right, well you’d better let him know in good time,’ said Robert, smiling at her, and allowing his imagination to contemplate just for a moment and with intense pleasure, how neatly such an arrangement would outflank and enrage Laurence, particularly if Kyle was indeed working for Lyttons. And then reminded himself sharply that Maud was only five, and that the last thing he wanted for her was to be ensnared in his family feud. Only – only of course it was going to be impossible for her not to be.

CHAPTER 14

LM looked down rather helplessly at Celia. Every so often she put out a tentative hand to touch her, to stroke her hair, to caress her back, and withdrew it again. What use were such gestures in the face of such pain? She had only seen Celia cry once in all the years she had known her, and that had been when she had lost her baby. Even then they had been brave, almost optimistic tears. But this helpless, hopeless Celia was shocking in her despair.

‘Celia – please,’ she said finally, ‘listen to me. Oliver is not dead. He’s injured, in hospital. Arguably safer, better off. You must try to—’

‘Try to what?’ said Celia turning a grief-wrecked face to her, ‘yes, LM, try to what exactly? Do go on, I’d like to know, tell me what I should try to do.’ Her voice was angry, ugly in its passion; LM looked back at her steadily.

‘Try to be hopeful,’ she said.

‘And what should I hope for? That he will have one or two limbs left? That he won’t be entirely blind? That he won’t have gone quite mad? I’m afraid I don’t find that very – helpful, LM.’

‘Celia, you don’t know anything yet. Only that he has been wounded.’

‘I think that’s quite a lot,’ said Celia quietly, ‘quite a lot. Minor wounds don’t take you to hospital, minor wounds don’t get you away from the front even.’

‘But—’

‘LM, would you mind leaving me. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I don’t think you can possibly understand how I feel. I would really rather be on my own.’

There was a silence; LM looked down at her hands. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘of course. I shall be downstairs, if you need me.’

‘You had far better go to the office,’ said Celia, ‘there is a great deal to be done.’

‘Yes, of course.’

She went down the stairs and was putting on her coat and hat before she realised she was weeping. Mrs Bill emerged from the dining-room, coal scuttle in hand.

‘Miss Lytton, what is it? It’s not – Colonel Lytton hasn’t been – ?’

‘No, no, Mrs Bill. Well, he hasn’t been killed. But he has been wounded and taken to a field hospital. We don’t know where, or how bad it is.’

‘Oh poor Lady Celia,’ said Mrs Bill. ‘Poor, poor Lady Celia.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said LM, ‘perhaps you could take her some tea later. Not just now, she wants to be alone,’ and hurried out of the door and down the steps, shocked, as always, by the ease with which her own still-savage pain and grief could be resurrected.

Two hours later she was correcting some proofs when her office door opened; Celia stood there, perfectly dressed, her hair in order, her face resolutely set.

She looked at LM and said simply, ‘I’m sorry. So very sorry for what I said. Of course you understand. Just for a moment I forgot.’

And LM stood up and held out her arms to her as she would to little Jay, and Celia went into them and they stood there together for a long time, not speaking, not crying even, simply drawing comfort from one another.

‘It was just thinking about Billy that really panicked me,’ said Celia later, over their customary lunch of bread and Beckenham cheese. ‘His missing leg, you know, thinking of Oliver without a leg. Just a stump. Or an arm, his sleeve pinned to his chest in that dreadful brave, ugly way. Or – suppose it was gas, LM, suppose he was blind, how would he bear it, how would I bear it for him?’

‘Well, you would,’ said LM, ‘both of you would. But it may not be. It may be something which you can cope with rather more easily.’

‘It might be shellshock,’ said Celia, ‘think of that. They never recover from that. He’s had a long war, LM, he was – well he was very—’ she stopped.

‘Afraid? Yes, I’m sure. He was never a very brave little boy. So different from Jack, who was born reckless. Rather like Jay, I’m afraid. But he’s been magnificent, right through this dreadful thing. He has so clearly learned courage. It must have cost him very dear.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it has,’ said Celia sadly, thinking not even of Oliver’s damaged body at that moment, but of his dreadfully changed and damaged spirit. ‘But he’s not the only one. Millions and millions of young men, all with their lives ruined. When, in the name of God, is it going to end?’

‘Now Barty, you mustn’t cry. It won’t help anybody. Especially not Lady Celia.’

Lady Beckenham had never subscribed to the Aunt Celia label; she considered it foolish and misleading, and had told Celia so. ‘You have to be brave, hope for the best for Mr Lytton.’

‘I’m not crying for him,’ said Barty, rubbing her eyes, blowing her nose dutifully on a very grubby handkerchief. ‘I’m being as brave as I can about him. I know I have to be.’

Lady Beckenham looked at her. She had grown very fond of her over the years; she seemed to her to be a rather remarkable child. Barty was eleven now, tall for her age, and very thin, not exactly pretty but extremely striking, with her great mass of golden-brown hair, and large brown eyes. She was highly intelligent; more so than the twins, Lady Beckenham sometimes thought and she also worked very hard. This could certainly not be said of the twins. Miss Adams said she considered Barty to be quite exceptional, and although Lady Beckenham was not altogether convinced by this, she was impressed by the fact that Barty was already reading the works of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, and could recite most of Shakespeare’s sonnets. She was not an intellectual woman, indeed she had hardly read any of Miss Austen’s work herself, and hated Shakespeare, but she did accept that they were a yardstick by which one could judge a child’s intellectual development. Even more impressive to her was the fact that Barty could do quite complicated algebra, and could draw maps of most of the major countries of the world freehand. She was a nice child too: all the nurses loved her, often said her help with the men was genuinely valuable.

‘Well, what are you crying about, then?’ she said now.

‘Billy.’

‘Billy! But he’s much better, back with your mother, doing well with his wooden leg I thought—’

‘Yes, he is, but he can’t get any work. He went to the brewery and they won’t take him, said they weren’t taking any amputees – such a horrible word – and that he wouldn’t be able to cope with the work. He tried some factories, but they all just sent him away. He wrote to me today about it. He says he wished he’d been killed. It’s not fair, when all he’s done is fight for his country.’

‘What’s he living on? Get a pension does he?’

A pension, she thought: at the age of eighteen. What kind of a world had this war created?

‘He will do. I’m not sure what you get for a leg.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked Lady Beckenham.

‘You get sixteen shillings a week for a right arm. Unless it’s below the elbow, then it’s only eleven shillings. One of the nurses told me. But she wasn’t sure about legs.’

Lady Beckenham was, for once in her life, silenced. The pragmatism of it was literally shocking. But she supposed the money available had to be apportioned somehow.

‘I’ll speak to Beckenham about it,’ she said finally. ‘He’ll know.’

‘But the thing is, he doesn’t want a pension. He wants to work. How can he sit around for the rest of his life, doing nothing? I’m sorry—’ her voice tailed off, she was crying again, ‘sorry, Lady Beckenham.’

Lady Beckenham looked at her, then rummaged in the pocket of her breeches for her own handkerchief.

‘Here you are, use this. It’s a bit cleaner than yours.’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m sorry. I will try not to – it’s just that I can’t see any hope for him. Ever again.’

There was a long silence. Then Lady Beckenham said, ‘Barty, how’s Billy doing on that wooden leg of his?’

‘Oh – all right I think,’ said Barty, ‘very well really. He’s practising up and down Line Street, he says. He can walk a few steps without the crutch even. He says every time he falls over he thinks of your grandpa and gets up again. Dot and carry one, they call him in the street.’

‘Good lad,’ said Lady Beckenham, ‘that’s the sort of thing I like to hear. Now listen. I’ve got a problem in the yard. One of those wretched girls is leaving, says she’ll get more money in a factory. It’s beyond me, I must say, ghastly work, but still. I can’t stop her. I think Billy could manage mucking out, watering, that sort of thing. I’m not making any allowances mind, he’s got to be able to cope with the work. But if he could – good gracious, Barty, you’ll have me over in a minute. There, there, don’t start crying again, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Still no news, Lady Celia?’

‘No,’ said Celia briskly, ‘no news. But I tell myself that has to mean good news.’

‘And you don’t know which hospital he’s in, even?’

‘No idea. Not yet. But you know, my mother says you can get used to anything, and it does seem to be true. I just coast along from day to day. Gill, forgive me for saying so, but you look dreadful, rather as if you’ve slept in your clothes, what on earth have you been doing?’

‘Sleeping in my clothes. Travelling on the tube all night,’ said Gill cheerfully.

‘All night? Why?’

‘There was a raid starting when I left here. Have you ever taken shelter in one of the tube stations?’

‘No,’ said Celia, ‘I haven’t. Mostly we take our chances at home. We once spent a night in the crypt at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, that was bad enough. There were so many people cooking their supper on primus stoves that the condensation was running down the walls.’

‘Well, the underground is worse. The smell is quite awful, and the snoring! Hideous. So I just sat on the tube, which keeps going round and round, and slept. Much nicer.’

‘Good Lord,’ said Celia, ‘how very enterprising of you. Keep that story for our war diaries. Is that the artwork for the poetry anthology?’

‘Yes. It’s very simple, I’m afraid, but I wanted to conserve the budget for the third volume of
Dispatches
. So just graphics – again.’ She sighed. ‘Did we really ever have colour on our jackets? Or was that some kind of hallucination?’

‘We did,’ said Celia firmly, ‘and we will again. That looks really nice, Gill, thanks.’

‘Good. I’ll tell them to go ahead then. How are the orders going on?’

‘Oh, not bad. You know.’ She smiled at Gill. ‘Certainly they’re going to be marvellous for
Dispatches
. I don’t know what we’d have done without those books.’

‘Your idea, Lady Celia.’

‘Was it? I’d forgotten.’

It hadn’t been true what she’d said to Gill; she didn’t think no news meant good news at all. She knew that with so many casualties, the letters and telegrams were dreadfully delayed. Oliver could have been dead for days and she wouldn’t have known. Nor was it true that she was getting used to it; her sense of dread, of almost physical terror, of shrinking from what the reality might be, was increasing. She no longer had bad dreams; she scarcely slept at all, merely dozed fitfully, surfaced endlessly, as with illness or pain. Indeed she felt both ill and in pain; she had constant nausea and a leaden ache in her stomach. Whatever she did, wherever she was, the visions rose before her: of the dreadful final telegram, or of an Oliver mutilated beyond recognition. She had thought nothing could be worse than the first shock; in fact the long days and nights – which followed six of them already – had proved infinitely more terrible. Without her work to concentrate on, to escape in, she would have gone quite mad; as it was, she felt very nearly so.

Work was, in any case, appallingly difficult: two of the girls she had hired as sales clerks-cum-representatives had given in their notice, in order to work in munitions factories, and now she had only two clerks left. Writing out the invoices was yet another thing she and LM had had to do more and more of recently.

Often they sat all evening in the cellar at Cheyne Walk, half-listening to the bombs falling while they worked.

‘As if it mattered,’ LM had said more than once, and Celia said nonsense, they couldn’t start thinking that way. If they did lose the war, it wasn’t going to be with James Thin of Edinburgh or Blackwells of Oxford owing them several hundred pounds. Occasionally the treacherous thought drifted into her head that they could just pack up Lyttons until the war was over and then re-open; but she always dismissed it sharply. Other houses were fighting on; it would be Macmillan or Collins or Blackwood who would truly benefit from their absence, and indeed when the time did come to open Lyttons’ doors once more, it could well be to no customers at all. And besides, Oliver had entrusted her with Lyttons, her and LM; they could not fail him. She owed him that, at the very least, in return for all he was doing for them. Them and the rest of the country.

The frequency of bombing had greatly increased. The old zeppelins had been replaced by far superior machines which could fly distances of up to a thousand miles, so that a round trip from Berlin to London for a bombing raid was perfectly feasible. Often she, LM and Mrs Bill and Brunson, who joined them in the cellar, would emerge at the end of a raid and go out into the night together to try to discover what harm had been done. One night there was heavy bombing particularly close; they could not see a great deal of it in the dark, but morning revealed a huge hole in Green Park, just by the back entrance of the Ritz, the windows out in half the buildings below Piccadilly, and a shower of shrapnel in the courtyard at Buckingham Palace.

They were all desperately tired. The long drive down to Beaconsfield to see the children was becoming less and less inviting. She knew that when she got there she would be confronted by further problems: the naughtiness of the twins, the difficulties Miss Adams was having teaching them all, Barty’s anxieties about Billy, Jay’s persistent bedwetting – not her responsibility exactly, but one which LM fretted over and shared with her endlessly – it went on and on.

And she missed Oliver so badly; she would never have believed how much. She missed hearing his voice, seeing him smile at her as he came into the room, all those happy, rambling conversations about the children, the more purposeful ones about Lyttons, even the battles over authors, budgets, promotion, publishing strategy. The thought of having him there to share her problems was almost unimaginable now. And keeping Lyttons afloat financially was more and more difficult; sales were falling, costs rising, and the premises were falling into disrepair, There was a hole in the roof caused indirectly by bomb damage. It wasn’t a large hole, but it let the rain in; every morning and evening they replaced the bucket which stood beneath it, but it was filling up faster all the time. The whole roof really needed to be replaced, but they simply could not afford it, and anyway, there was no one to do it. Builders and roofers were in terribly short supply; even the chimney sweep was a woman, who had taken the business over from her husband. She was astonishingly cheerful and brave; they always gave her tea when she had finished, and some toast if there were no biscuits. ‘Lot better now, it is,’ she would say, slurping tea out of her saucer, ‘rather be halfway up a chimney any day than halfway down a washtub.’