The House at Tyneford (41 page)

“Drink,” he commanded, pointing to my half-full glass. “Elsie. That’s quite like Elise, but a good old-fashioned English name.”

I winced and shook my head. “Absolutely not. My sister called me that and I hated it.”

He laughed, a low unfamiliar sound. “Then how about something after your parents? Anna is nice and English. Or, if you want to be named for your father, Julia is pretty.”

“No. We only name children after the dead. It carries their memory forward. To name a child after someone living brings bad luck, even death.”

Mr. Rivers fell silent and I realised with a pang of guilt that he was thinking he had given his own name to his son.

I glanced around the garden. It was shrouded by nighttime shadows, a breeze rustled through the fig tree overhanging the terrace and I imagined that I heard a low thrum from the soil, earthworms churning beneath the surface. Stray stars poked through the mantle of cloud and I could distinguish the pale tufts of sheep scattered about the hillside. I licked my lips and they tasted of salt. Nothing had changed and everything had changed. At once, I knew my name.

“Alice,” I said firmly.

I was Alice through the Looking Glass; I had fallen into a topsy-turvy world, where everything looked the same but was the other way around. I longed to wade out into the breakers on the shore, where the pounding of the waves overwhelmed the noise in my mind. I felt sick standing still. It was as though the quiet meadows and stone ground shook and tossed like the green sea.

“Alice. Alice Land,” repeated Mr. Rivers, testing out my new name like an unfamiliar dish. “Yes, all right. It sounds well enough. Expect it’ll take a bit of getting used to.”

I closed my eyes and wondered if he could see the piece of me break away. I felt myself cleave in two: Alice and Elise. I smiled; it was a little death. Part of me had died with Kit, the part of me that dreamed of marriage to her sweetheart and picnics on the lawn, and a wedding with Anna in her black silk and Julian in his dinner jacket, and me taking the novel out of the viola and lying in a hammock with Kit by Durdle Door, and allowing him to peel off my stockings one by one and run his fingers along my smooth, plump thighs, and drifting on a boat with him at dusk—both of us naked and me trailing a lazy toe in the water and letting him kiss my belly and throat and breasts, and the pleasure of languid summer days. It was easier if I was no longer Elise. Another girl, one whom I used to be, had dreamed of those things. Now, my name is Alice.

T
he August sun raged and the rugged Dorset cattle huddled beneath the spreading trees, seeking shade. The sheep fared better, shorn by one of the travelling gangs of shearers and left comically bald, soft sprouts of new wool appearing patchily across their backs. The hedgerows wore the thick gloss of high summer, the brambles studded with white flowers and tight green berries. The countryside carried on just the same without Kit. Nothing in nature cared for him: not the larks laughing as they alighted in clouds from the mulberry bushes, nor the fork-tongued adder basking open-eyed on the sandy heath. And yet, despite nature’s indifference, both Mr. Rivers and I sought our solace out of doors.

My skin ripened, and I was as lean and strong as one of the roe deer galloping across the hilltop. My parents would not recognise me with my new name and close-cropped hair as I crisscrossed the meadows, watching the sheep. I had taken over from the shepherd’s boy, the latest to receive his commission. The shepherd, Eddie Stickland, was as old and weathered as the salt-lashed hazels on the cliff, and as he climbed the sloped meadows the wind blew him sideways like a leaf curl.

Tending the flock, it was as if nothing had changed: the seasonal rhythms were as steady as the grinding of the sheep as they chewed the tough hill grass. But that August in 1940, the war came to Tyneford. We no longer sat at the edge of the conflict, concerned about distant battlefields in foreign lands. I spent several evenings sitting on the steps of the shepherd’s hut watching the planes. The hut was a small painted caravan perched on the top of the hill like a bowler hat. The only light was a torch with the regulation layers of paper stuck over the lamp, but, aware of the severe shortage of batteries, I was loath to even turn it on. I heard the growl of aeroplanes flying low across the channel. I hadn’t learned yet to distinguish whether they belonged to “us” or “them” or both. A fine haze covered the sea, so that the noise of explosions and the rat-a-tat of gunfire was strangely bodiless, an invisible battle behind the mist. I expected that nearby Portland must be getting hit or else a small war seethed out at sea. The sheep grazed, nonchalant and oblivious. They hid during a thunderstorm and yet this, being somehow outside nature, remained beyond their reckoning. As the sun vanished beneath the horizon, stars began to emerge one by one, as though a celestial Mrs. Ellsworth was busy with her taper and candles. The hillside was quiet, filled only with the huffing of the sheep and the far-off rustle and snuffle of a badger or hedgehog, while from out at sea came the steady patter of guns and the whine and bang of shells. I sat in the growing darkness and listened.

I heard gunshots. Not the pounding of distant artillery but a gun being fired close by. Had a fifth columnist broken cover or the Home Guard cornered a spy? Curiosity overcame fear and I hurried along the spine of the hill to the steep path leading down the cliff and emerged onto the beach. The night was cool and the beach so still that at first I thought it deserted. Perhaps I had been mistaken, and the sound had been a trick of the tide, or a farmer scaring a fox from his chickens. I padded along the rocks, trying to get the panorama of the bay. Then I saw him. On the edge of the surf stood a man holding a revolver. As I watched, he cocked it and fired it into the waves.

“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you all,” he shouted, aiming the gun again at some invisible enemy.

I recognised the voice. It was Mr. Rivers. I scanned the water again, but there was nothing there—neither man nor boat. He raised the gun and squeezed the trigger, but the chamber was empty. He felt in his pocket for more bullets and I sprinted to him, trying to grab his arm before he had time to reload. He spun around, raising the gun again. On seeing it was me, he lowered it. “Alice,” he said. “They’re coming. I heard them coming and I won’t let them have him.” Then growing angry, he turned on me. “I could have hurt you, stupid girl.”

He staggered and aimed the empty revolver again at the sea. I tugged on his arm and he shook me off, casting me into the water. He fumbled with a bullet and, terrified he would injure himself or me, I shoved him as hard as I could. We both fell into the surf. He remained sprawled in the water, making no attempt to get up. I sat beside him and smelled the alcohol on his breath. He did not resist as I pried the revolver from his grasp.

“I am a little drunk, Alice,” he said, lying back in the shallows, letting the waves lap around him, soaking the fine wool of his suit.

“Very drunk,” I corrected, remaining beside him. “And where did you get the gun?”

“It’s mine. I’m leader of the auxiliaries in these parts. I’m to head the resistance and keep out the invaders. Very hush-hush.”

“You weren’t being terribly hush-hush just then.”

“No. I suppose not. Pity. You didn’t suspect a thing till now. Went training for a week in Wiltshire and told you and Kit that I was going to London.”

I looked at him in surprise. “You weren’t really in town?”

He shook his head. “Neither of you even asked why I was going. You were both so pleased to have me gone and be alone.” He smiled. “It’s all right. Don’t look so guilty. I remember what it was like to be twenty-one and in love.”

“What were you shooting at just now?” I asked, changing the topic.

“I don’t remember. I heard planes. I thought . . . I don’t know.”

On the horizon a ship blazed and grey flakes of ash wafted ashore and landed on our skin like a dirty snow shower. I did not offer him any empty words of comfort, just sat with him and watched the ship glow.

“Did shooting at the sea make you feel any better?”

“No. My family is still dead.”

He stated this as a mere fact without any hint of self-pity. It was odd but I’d never really thought about Mrs. Rivers as being Mr. Rivers’ wife; I’d always thought of her as Kit’s mother.

“Do you miss your wife as well as Kit?”

Mr. Rivers sat up, the water licking around his feet. “No. It’s so long ago. It was a sad and awful thing. But not like this.”

I watched the burning ship and wished the flames could burn inside me too, cauterise the wound. I was as lonely as I had been during my first days at Tyneford. No. I stopped myself. This was a lie. I missed my family, hating the silence that war had brought, and I wanted Kit so badly that my ribs hurt. In the stories I told to myself, I was always the heroine, the dying soprano with the waspish waist, adored and mourned by her desolate admirers—but fate had left me alive and in excellent health. It was the hero who had gone. And yet, I shared my loneliness. I knew that Mr. Rivers’ pain must be worse than mine. No father should bury his son; human hearts were not made for such grief. I had Mr. Rivers’ friendship, and if I loved Kit I must help soothe his father, make his pain a thing he could bear.

I made small changes to the running of the house. It would never be the same and it was useless to pretend otherwise. I did not want Kit’s room to become some sort of ghastly mausoleum. In Vienna, when the great-aunts lost their mother they preserved her things in tissue paper, not even taking the hair out of her comb or emptying the tea from her cup. They never used the room, even though she’d been dead ten years before I was born, and the aunts—slotted beside one another on the sofa like books on a narrow shelf—could certainly have done with the space. Margot and I were afraid to go into our great-great-grandmother’s room, terrified that her ghost lay inside, perfectly preserved within a rustle of tissue paper. I would not let this happen to Kit. Children would not be scared of visiting his room, as though he were some brittle, yellow-toothed phantom. Mrs. Ellsworth bristled at what she perceived to be my lack of sentimentality.

“Barely cold in his grave and you’re turning out his things. What would he think, miss?”

I gave her what I hoped was a hard stare.

“Mrs. Ellsworth, Kit doesn’t have a grave. And since he’s dead, he doesn’t think at all. He certainly doesn’t need three very handsome navy blue Guernsey sweaters. Burt, on the other hand, I’m sure could find use for them.”

Mrs. Ellsworth bustled out, grumbling about “the heartless girl” whose “Hunnish tendencies” were only buried after all.

I sat down on Kit’s bed. The room contained the scent of his ever-present cigarettes, that unique Turkish blend. He’d left his silver cigarette case and I helped myself. A box of matches lay beside the framed photograph of his mother and one of Kit, taken on the morning of his twenty-first birthday. Kit and his mother had died at almost the same age, and in the photographs side by side on the dresser they appeared more like brother and sister. At least I remembered Kit. He had not disappeared so absolutely from the world as Mrs. Rivers. I lit my cigarette and inhaled the scent of Kit. If we ever had visitors, I would direct Mrs. Ellsworth to make up this room. It must be done—we could not shut him away in a closed-off room.

I made my way downstairs. During the last few months I had remembered how to dawdle. The hectic dash of the housemaid was in my past, and I knew from Diana and Juno that the English upper classes believed an idle saunter to be an important distinction of rank. Only the middle classes risked a jog. I couldn’t care less about rank, but I found it hard to hurry. My limbs were weary and cumbersome, and I was always tired. The only time I had energy was when I was striding across the hills and fields and through the damp summer woods.

Mr. Rivers was in the morning room, drinking a cup of coffee. He did not sit, but lingered beside the long windows, gazing across the lawns at the downy clouds drifting along Tyneford Barrow. Usually he took his breakfast early, sometimes so early that I wondered if he’d been to bed at all.

“Good morning, Mr. Rivers.”

He turned toward me but avoided meeting my eye. “I am sorry about last night. I would be grateful if—”

“I shan’t say a word—you must know that.”

He nodded and then said briskly to change the subject, “We’re haymaking again today.”

All week from my perch upon Tyneford Cap, I had watched him driving one of the farm horses across the fields below, his shoulder bent against the beast’s neck, cajoling, shouting or else standing behind the vast rolling rake that gathered up the grass in wide green stripes. Now, in the elegant morning room with its cheerful yellow paper and breakfast china, he lurked in his work clothes; his Sav-ile Row suit replaced by coarse trousers, hobnail boots and a plain white shirt. The sunlight caught his face, and I saw a growth of dark stubble upon his jaw. I wondered why Mr. Wrexham had not shaved him. The butler-valet certainly would have baulked at laying out such an ordinary wardrobe for his master.