The Passing Bells (45 page)

His portrait in pastels and charcoal looked down at her from the wall, her portrait beside his. Done so long ago. Not just in time, although a year and a half was a long time—she had just turned eighteen then—but almost a different era. Mario's in King's Road in July of 1914, with painters and writers, actors and poets, and the wine bottles and candles. . . . It was all gone now. Shuttered and padlocked. Closed by the police because pacifists and radicals had been suspected of gathering there. Captain Fenton Wood-Lacy, his portrait showed, was dressed in mufti then—a striped blazer, straw skimmer in his right hand. Now he was Lieutenant Colonel Fenton Wood-Lacy, DSO. She had read of his new rank and his decoration in the
Times.
One always read the lists—the dead, the wounded, the missing . . . and the promoted. “Lieut. Col. F. Wood-Lacy” would call back within half an hour. Whatever would they talk about?

His voice was the same as she remembered it, a deep, throaty timbre.

“Ah, Winifred, I hope I'm not inconveniencing you by calling.”

“Not at all, Fenton. How nice to hear your voice.”

“I got in last night . . . staying at the Guards' Club.”

“Oh? Did you give up your flat?”

“Yes, a long time ago. Sublet it to a brigadier at the War Office. He's a major general now so I can hardly boot him out of the place, can I?”

“No,” she said, forcing a tiny laugh. “Hardly. Do you have a long leave?”

“A few weeks.”

“And then back to France?”

“No . . . up to Yorkshire.” There was a slight pause. “I thought we might have tea together somewhere . . . that is, if you're free this afternoon.”

“I would enjoy that, yes.”

“Shall we say four-thirty?”

“That would be fine.”

How correct and proper he was, she thought bitterly as she hung up the phone. Honor bound to at least see her. After all, he had taken the first step that long-ago July in the ritual of courtship. That ritual was now as archaic as the pavane, one of the lesser casualties of the war, but he was too much of a gentleman to totally ignore it. So he would take her to tea. Not to dinner and the theater, with dancing afterward at the Cafe Royal, but to
tea
! Ices and petits fours and an apologetic, avuncular pat on the hand.

The Guards' Club was crowded, and it was depressing to Fenton to see such a vast number of men whom he didn't know. So many of his friends and brother officers had gone west that he felt uncomfortably conspicuous for still being alive, like a lone survivor of some dreadful catastrophe, pointed at, whispered about: “There goes Wood-Lacy, last of the Sandhurst class of 1908.”

Well, hardly. He finally bumped into enough of his peers in the bar to assure himself that his mortality wasn't unique. But he found their conversations morbid. All shared the same experiences in much the same places at the same times—rue du Bois and Festubert, Auchy and the dismal approaches to Loos. Their words nagged at old pains and still raw nerves.

“Must be off,” he said, draining a whiskey and soda after glancing at his watch. He walked briskly out of the club and along Pall Mall toward the taxi stand in St. James's Square. Tattered sheets of gray cloud scudded overhead. The streaming fragments reminded him of shrapnel bursts and he could see his last command in the wind: B Company, struggling through cratered ground, whizz-bangs and machine guns catching them. The first platoon lurching toward the ridge, stopped by the German wire, dozens of them hanging in the rusty thickets for days. Ragged husks, blackened clods against the skyline. . . .

The taxicab door closed with a comforting chunky sound. Although sealed from the counterbarrage by solid Austin walls, he sat stiffly on the edge of the seat all the way to Cadogan Square.

The war had touched half a million English homes, an avalanche of letters or telegrams pushed through letter slots telling of dead or wounded men, missing men, captured men. Number 24 Cadogan Square was such a home. Two dead sons. Two living sons anxious to get over to France and . . .

“Scupper Boche,” Lord Sutton remarked heatedly as he poured whiskey into two glasses. “By gad, Fenton, that's all young John and Bramwell think about . . . getting up to the line and killing the blighters.”

He had never met them, but they were probably like Andrew and Timothy had been—recklessly brave. Their father's sons. He glanced past the portly red-faced man. A full-length portrait of him hung on one wall of the library. The young marquess in hussar uniform. The painter had captured that look of zeal and arrogance that had sent Victorians galloping heedlessly toward the guns: “Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell. . . .”

“It pays to be cautious in France,” Fenton said quietly.

If Lord Sutton heard him, he paid no attention to the remark.

“A mere dollop of soda water. Too fine a whiskey to spoil. Pure malt, sir. From my own distillery in Kinlochewe. No contaminating neutral spirits, which I wouldn't rub on a horse.” He handed Fenton a glass and raised his own. “To your decoration and your rise in rank. I suppose this means you'll be commanding a battalion now, eh?”

“Yes, sir . . . one of the New Army mobs. I'm to train it and have it in France by next spring.”

“As part of which regiment?”

“The Green Howards.”

“I was with the Eleventh Hussars . . . Prince Albert's own . . . the Cherry Pickers, sir!”

Lord Sutton was not really looking at him, Fenton realized as he sipped his drink. The eyes were glazed and fixed on some point in the distant past. They were the eyes of a man who was fortunate to have his own distillery. He talked ceaselessly, leaping from one disconnected subject to the next until Lady Mary entered the room, and then he sat down and lapsed into a moody silence.

“Ah, my dear Fenton! Most noble heart!” She came toward him like some gaunt predatory bird. Her hands never stopped moving, and long ropes of jade and jet beads swung from around her throat. “Dear little Winifred will be ready shortly . . . fussing with her hair, poor child. I am quite vexed with her today . . . quite vexed, really I am. Her own brothers crying out from that awful void, anxious to come home, and she won't lift a finger to help them. But of course you understand, I'm sure.”

He listened with growing apprehension to Lady Mary's talk of the spirit world, of Ouija boards and Ram the Nubian. He pitied Winifred living amid such irrationality. She'd always been under her mother's thumb, and her refusal to take part in this nonsense was bound to have its repercussions. He expected to see a mousy, half-beaten creature, so he barely recognized the tall, beautiful woman who entered the library.

In the back of the taxi, as they drove to Mayfair, he couldn't keep from staring at her. The change in her was dramatic. He had remembered her, with twinges of shame, as a schoolgirl of touching eagerness, whose gratitude for his attentions had been almost embarrassing. And yet there had been a quality about her even then that had intrigued him. He had truly enjoyed being with her and he felt that same sense of ease now.

“Why are you staring at me?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I was trying to recall the Winifred I knew.”

“Have I changed that much?”

“Well, you're older, of course.”

“So are you, for that matter.”

“Yes, about a century older.” He didn't want to appear rude, and so he deliberately looked away from her and stared at the back of the driver's neck. “You're a very lovely young woman, Winifred.”

“Thank you . . . and you're still a very . . .” A smile barely teased her lips. “I was going to say ‘lovely-looking' man. But that's hardly the correct word, is it? The word to describe a colonel would be ‘distinguished.' Yes, you're very distinguished.” She glanced out the side window. It was getting dark and crowds streamed across Hyde Park Corner toward the Underground station in Piccadilly. “Must we go to tea?”

“Don't you feel like having tea?”

“Not especially.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Oh . . . go to Madame Tussaud's. I've always wanted to see the chamber of horrors . . . Sweeney Todd cutting throats and Jack the Ripper. Father would never take me to see that section of the waxworks, but I had a friend in school, Rose Collins. She's seen it several times. Her uncle used to take her.”

His hearing was not so numbed by shellfire that he couldn't detect sarcasm when he heard it. He leaned forward and tapped on the glass.

“Stop here, driver.”

They walked along Piccadilly in silence, not because they had nothing to say to each other, but because the wind had picked up and was driving grains of ice into their faces. He took hold of her arm and led her into Half Moon Street and into the warm, spacious lobby of the Torrington Hotel.

“Did your friend's uncle ever buy the child a pink gin?”

“He may have,” she said thoughfully. “But I doubt it.”

“May I buy you one, or will it alter your growth?”

“You're angry, aren't you?”

“Don't you think I have a right to be?”

“Yes . . . and no. Let's just say, for the sake of fairness, that we both have a right.”

The saloon-bar was crowded with officers and well-dressed women. There was a tiny dance floor—every hotel saloon-bar had a dance floor now—and a four-piece ragtime band was playing the Castle walk. Winifred cast a stony glance at the women and a wildly cavorting Canadian second lieutenant.

“Could you find someplace quieter?”

He escorted her upstairs to the main salon, where more sedate couples sat taking tea or cocktails. An elderly waiter in livery showed them to a table on the glassed-in balcony that had a fine view of Green Park. Fenton ordered a pink gin and a whiskey-soda and the drinks were quickly brought out on a silver tray.

“You feel that I'm being patronizing, don't you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I think you're just being noble . . . the honorable thing to do. A less considerate man would have simply ignored the situation entirely and not called on me at all.” She took a sip of her gin. “Quite tasty. Odd. Us having a drink together in a public place. Quite unthinkable a year and a half ago, but ‘
tempora mutantur
' and all that.”

“Yes, times change, but human emotions do not. If I've hurt you, Winifred, I'm deeply sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. The war has changed everyone's plans. I suppose we'd be married by now if Germany hadn't marched into Belgium. I wonder if we'd be happy. Probably. I would have a handsome husband and you would have . . . what? Why did you choose me, Fenton? It wasn't love. I wasn't under that illusion even then. Fundamentally monetary, I suppose. Or is that an uncalled-for remark?”

“No. You deserve to know why. It's true I needed money to stay in the regiment. It was either marry well or resign my commission. Your father understood my motive, so did Andrew. Their feelings were that I'd make you a good husband. That was my rationale as well. And I would have. But it wasn't just money—I wasn't that cold-blooded about it. I would have sought out some simpering daughter of a Sheffield millionaire if I had been. God knows there were enough of that sort fluttering about Mayfair ballrooms. I liked you . . . enjoyed your company. I enjoy it now.”

She toyed absently with her drink, turning the slender glass between her fingers.

“What would you do if I held you to your obligation to at least ask me to marry you?”

“I would propose, of course.”

“Of course. I hardly needed to ask the question, did I?” She set her drink on the table and looked at him, her face expressionless. “I have difficulty sometimes in remembering what I was like that summer . . . or what you were like. We're different people now, aren't we? Not just in a physical sense. I mean to say, too much has happened in our lives for us not to have been altered quite drastically. But I recall how infatuated I was . . . how utterly giddy I felt. I knew in my heart that you couldn't possibly be in love with me, but I was desperate to be engaged by the end of July. I felt I owed it to my mother for all of her efforts to see me wed. She made me feel that it was all my fault Charles hadn't dropped on one knee . . . that, somehow, I'd made a mess of it. But then she never had to walk in the garden with Charles as I did, knowing that every time he looked at me he was comparing me with Lydia Foxe. That was cruel. I couldn't possibly compete. I felt like such a frump. And then, out of the blue, you strolled into my life with a box of sweets under your arm. No man's timing could have been more perfect . . . or more deliberately planned.”

He took a hefty pull at his drink and then dug into his jacket for a tin of cigarettes.

“I hope you don't mind if I smoke.”

“Not at all.”

“This is rather like hearing a story about two unattractive strangers. You're an exceedingly beautiful woman. You don't need to feel grateful if a man looks at you.”

“And you don't need a rich wife in order to stay in the army. The slate has been wiped clean, Fenton. It's like meeting for the first time.”

“My feelings exactly. What say we make a proper evening of it—dinner at Romano's or upstairs at the Cafe Royal . . .”

Her smile went unnoticed as she took a sip of her drink.

“Sounds like fun, but I really don't feel up to celebrating. Will you be in London long?”

He felt a twinge of disappointment and a sense of having been deliberately cut by her. How deeply did she resent him? he wondered. He blew a thin stream of cigarette smoke from the corner of his mouth.

“On and off for the next two weeks. I'm going down to Abingdon for the weekend. May I telephone you next week?”

She looked at him without a flicker of emotion—a cautious, deliberating gaze. “Yes,” she said with a slight nod. “If you really want to.”