The Gates of Rutherford (4 page)

Charlotte had hurried across to them that morning—out of anxiety more than anything else. She had been told to keep a close watch on Joshua Smith. He was a Lewis gunner in the Naval Air Service—or rather, he had been. But Allington had trouble believing that such a life as he had lived in the last two years was now in the past. He had been in a state of confusion for some time even after his diagnosis.
“I'll go back when I can see again,” he'd told her robustly on the day that he had been admitted. “It'll come back. It's only the cold.”

His pilot had ditched at sea. They had quite simply run out of fuel over the Channel, way out past Dover, towards the North Sea, on the coast of Norfolk. “We got lost,” he had added, smiling to himself. “That's what I reckon, lost.” No one had told him any different that first day. The difference being that his pilot was dead, and Joshua blinded, slumped unconscious, had known nothing until the water hit him.

“It's the cold, the cold,” he had kept saying. She had sat with him on the first evening. He had been feverish and kept removing himself from the bed. She had caught him feeling his way down the corridor, his fingers pinching the wooden rail at waist height. He'd heard her footsteps behind him. “Where am I?” he'd asked her. “In hospital at home,” she'd told him, and gently taken hold of his arm.

“Don't put me back with the blind,” he'd said. “I'm not blind. It's only the cold of the sea that's done it. It's temporary.” And on, and on. The cold, the cold. Eventually she had got him to sit down on a chair in the corridor. The lights were all low, the gas sputtering in the gaskets.

“We went up steeply,” he murmured. “Then it stopped and started to go back. It had no speed, no power. The wind was stronger than the power it had to go forward, you see.” He had paused, reliving the stalling of the engine and the aching silence that took the place of the roar of the prop and the rushing of the air as they descended. “I could see it coming towards us,” he continued. He spoke slowly, dreamily. “You'll not see that often, you know? I have it here in my mind.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “I have that picture—of the waves, you know—like corrugated iron, and the very color of iron. I closed my eyes as we hit, and that's what's done it. The cold shut my eyes.”

She'd stayed for a long time holding his hand, and eventually he submitted to being taken back to bed.

When she had seen him again the following week, he had asked, “Is it the lady who was here on my first night?”

“It is.”

“You'll have to forgive me for my stupidity,” he told her. “The doctor has spoken to me.” He had shrugged and spread his hands. “It's that there's no pain to speak of,” he said. “You understand, no pain, not what I would class as pain, really?”

She'd hesitated by the bed.

“I thought it must have been the shock of the seawater. But of course it can't be that.” Charlotte had tried not to look into his face; rather, she occupied herself by staring at a spot on the linoleum so that she would not cry at his pathetic good humor, the embarrassment at his confusion. He had tapped his hand on the counterpane and gave a little gusting sigh. “A piece of the aircraft,” he said. “Not a bullet at all, not a shell. Ridiculous. So . . . I'm not quite sure what I shall do. . . .”

“That will all be explained.”

“Will it?” he'd asked. “But I'm a gunner in the Navy. I'm in the Navy, you see. . . .”

Hard to let go. To imagine any other life. “My brother is with the Flying Corps in France,” she'd replied.

“Is he?” There had been a long silence.

“I must get on.”

“Of course,” he'd replied, with that same bewildered air. “Of course.”

And it had been Allington who had been sitting on the bench with Christine the very first time that Charlotte had met her.

Charlotte was wary—so many visitors just appeared and thought they were being helpful. They wandered in out of Regent's Park
despite all efforts to dissuade them. Charlotte's worst fear was that she would come across some motherly women weeping over a “poor blinded boy,” as she had once found.

But she need not have worried with Christine Nesbitt.

Christine had not an ounce of pathos in her, nor was she taken to weeping. But she was an avid, intelligent listener. And as she spoke, she drew.

That morning—frost was on the ground all around them—Christine had a drawing pad balanced on her lap and was sketching as she listened to Allington. As Charlotte had drawn nearer, she had heard what Allington was saying.

“When I first got in a cockpit, I shot at the enemy with two Enfield rifles,” he was telling her. “Not much use. And then we got the Lewis gun.” He had begun to laugh quietly to himself. “Marvelous thing, but we had to shoot through the prop. Imagine that! Shoot through the thing that was keeping you in the air. Then they invented a synchromesh gear.”

Drawing rapidly, Christine had not looked up, but she asked the question. “What was that?”

“Clever. It synchronized the firing of the gun through the propeller.”

“Gosh. That
is
clever.”

“Made life easier.”

“Of course.”

Christine had then looked up at Charlotte, realizing that they were being observed. She smiled broadly.

“It's a funny thing,” Allington was saying, unaware that Charlotte was close by, standing on the grass. “Of all the things I see in my mind's eye, it's the sea and the muzzle of the Lewis aimed through the propellers. The rippling look of the sea, and the rippling of the propeller. Why do you suppose that is?”

Christine did not offer any trite opinion. She sat back and thought about what Allington had said. “The two are very similar,” she observed, at last. “When you think about it. They're a pattern. Rippling lines. One horizontal. One vertical. You'll have developed observation by looking through the Lewis gun lines and the propeller, won't you? So it's stayed there.”

“I see it,” he said. “Just like when you shut your eyes against the sun, you see patterns of whatever was there.”

“Shadows and lines.”

“Yes, quite.” Allington smiled. He had a pleasant face, if one did not look too closely at his scars—the fretwork of lines that radiated over his forehead and brows. Then he seemed to realize Charlotte's presence, and turned around.

“It's Nurse Cavendish.” She was allowed to call herself this, halfway through her VAD training. “Shall we walk back? The doctor's rounds will be very shortly.”

She had glanced at the drawing pad before she left.

Christine had not drawn Allington. She had drawn his vision of the sea.

•   •   •

C
harlotte gazed at Christine now above the rim of her glass.

“Did you draw me today?”

“I didn't bring anything. But I shall if you like. You and Michael together, a portrait?”

“I suppose that's the done thing. I'll ask Father to commission a portrait. He can afford you. I can't.”

Christine laughed. She had become well known in the last few months, after she had painted Dora Carrington. “Shall I be outrageously expensive?”

“Outrageously.”

“Oh good,” Christine said. “It will pay my bills all winter. Will he mind?”

“Father?” Charlotte considered. “You know, he doesn't seem to mind anything much. Not at all how he used to be. It's sweet, but odd. He seems like a volcano that's gone silent. I don't know what would rouse him. I sometimes fear it.”

“That he'll blow his top? Over what?”

“Who knows, if Mother's situation doesn't rouse him? He looks at her with such mystification. So very perplexed. I worry that one day his anger will come back.”

“What will he do? Chase her up the Strand with a carving knife?”

Charlotte laughed, then her face fell. “Perhaps,” she murmured. “Dear God, I hadn't considered that.”

Christine put down her glass and came and sat beside Charlotte on the bed. “It was a joke, darling.” She put her hand over Charlotte's, and Charlotte looked down at their intertwined fingers.

“Do you remember when Mother brought you to Rutherford last year?”

“How could I forget? Such a shock.” Christine gazed up at the ceiling, smiling, remembering. She then closed her eyes. “An arts fair. I thought I was coming to one of those dreadful charity galas. You know . . . ‘one of our remarkable lady artists.' The one I had been to before in Chelsea Town Hall had been run by a set of behatted matrons who asked if I would do little caricatures of guests for sixpence a time. They thought that's what I did . . . cartoons and sketches. It was purgatory.”

Charlotte smiled, looking at the arch of Christine's neck, the sculptured bone of her clavicle, the thinness of the shoulders under the purple linen tunic. She had a momentary longing to reach out and touch Christine's skin. It was translucent, as if the young woman were not really flesh and blood.

“And so your Mother asked me to come to Yorkshire. I thought, Yorkshire! Where on earth is that?” She opened her eyes. Charlotte rapidly looked away.

“You were a sensation.”

“Of course I was,” Christine replied. “I
am
a sensation. Don't you know that?”

They smiled at each other.

“I do like your sister,” Christine observed. “I've been chatting to her. She's such a sweetie, isn't she? She was so nice to me when I came to Rutherford.” She leaned closer to Charlotte. “I caught her reading a letter just now in the ladies' cloakroom. Who is it that writes to her? Is it a beau?”

Charlotte frowned. “Not that I know of. Why do you think so?”

“She was so utterly absorbed. And, you know”—Christine wriggled the fingers of both hands in the air—“away with the fairies. Smiling. A certain
sort
of smile. As soon as she noticed me, she hid it away in her purse. Is it a secret romance, do you suppose?”

“I hope not. Not after Charles de Montfort and the elopement.”

“My God, I'd forgotten. But she wouldn't do that again, surely.”

“Louisa lives at Rutherford with Father. I can't think she's found anyone at all to be romantic with in Yorkshire. You haven't met our local chaps, have you? Hardly the types to steal a girl's heart.”

Christine laughed. “Born with a silver spoon in the mouth, and so unable to string two words together? Yes, I know the type. There's plenty of those in London, too.”

They sat in silence for a while, both staring at the discarded wedding dress. Eventually, Christine bestirred herself. “Shall you live with your Mother, you and Michael?”

“Oh no. We have our own house.”

Christine gasped in surprise. “Your own? How wonderful.” She
pressed her hands together in something like an attitude of prayer. “And do you have . . . space? Of your own?”

“It isn't really very big. It's a mews. A town house.”

“But you have your own bedroom?”

“No.” Charlotte got up and walked to the window.

“Oh, but I suppose that doesn't matter,” Christine said hastily. “It's rather cozy, isn't it? Two birds in a nest.”

Charlotte leaned on the windowsill, looking down on the gardens. “Yes.”

Behind her, Christine was frowning. But then she got to her feet, placing her glass on the bedside cabinet. “You must come and see me when you get back,” she said. “I can't think why you've never come to my rooms before, when I've been over at your mother's house so much. Lovely parties! So . . . we'll put that right. I should like us to be much better friends, wouldn't you? Where are you off on honeymoon? Did your mother say Dorset?”

Charlotte turned. “You want me to come to your studio?”

“Well, you must if I'm to paint the two of you.”

“Oh, of course. Yes. We shall. We shall telephone you when we come back.”

Christine laughed. “I don't have a telephone, darling. I don't have anything much at all. You'll see when you come. Bare boards and a gas ring, and a sort of couch that I sleep on. I can't cook—I never knew how. Do you?”

“No, not at all.”

“Will you have a cook at your little house?”

“Yes. Michael's mother has seen to it.”

Christine heard the faint tone of irritation. She gave a hearty, gusty sigh. “Well, how lucky!” she exclaimed, trying to be jolly. “I wish I did. My aunt thinks I'm turning into a gypsy. Which is quite
bothering, because she gives me an annuity, bless her. I need to keep on the right side of her. But the frowns and the wiping of fingers when she visits—it's hard to bear! Do you know what she said to me the last time she came? She said, ‘I sincerely hope you will grow out of this malodorous phase, Christine.'” She let out a peal of laughter. “Malodorous! I didn't realize I was quite that bad. Actually, her own place has a whiff of the sepulchre about it. Mothballs, paneling, polish. Like an undertaker's parlor!”

Charlotte did not seem to be listening. She was absentmindedly picking up clothes from the floor and was carrying them around on one arm, as if she had no idea what she should do with them.

“So,” Christine labored on. “Don't disapprove of me and my hovel, will you?”

Charlotte at last looked up at her. “No,” she replied, almost puzzled. “I don't think I could ever disapprove of a little studio.” She smiled wistfully. “It must be heaven.”

•   •   •

A
s Christine Nesbitt went down the stairs, she met Octavia Cavendish coming up.

“Have you been to see Charlotte?” Octavia asked.

“I think she needs a mother's touch,” Christine told her. “She seems quite nervous. Distracted.”

“Nervous?” Octavia echoed, raising an eyebrow. “I shouldn't think so. Charlotte has never been afraid of anything in her life.”