The Wild Dark Flowers (20 page)

“It would be better not to,” the girl said quietly. “It sort of emphasizes it, you see. Your hesitation in the first place. They don’t mind your being shocked. But we are all absolutely lectured against apologies or sympathy, that sort of thing. It doesn’t help.”

They walked onwards; Charlotte hooked her mother’s arm. Octavia glanced at her as if a stranger had materialized alongside her. They smiled at each other.

“And besides,” Florence added after a moment or two, “He’s a fine chap, but he really is awfully common.”

Despite all Florence’s good works, Octavia decided, there was a portion of Hetty de Ray’s blithe insouciant snobbery here after all.

T
he passengers on the
Lusitania
were not allowed to send messages, but they could receive them.

John knew Alfred Vanderbilt by sight—they had sailed together once or twice at the yacht club—and late in the afternoon he saw Vanderbilt coming towards him, smiling, and pocketing a wireless message. He held out his hand and Gould shook it; Vanderbilt smiled. “Someone is looking forward to seeing me soon. She wishes me a safe crossing.”

John made small talk with him, all the while envying his message. He would have given anything to receive such a one from Octavia. It seemed to him that Vanderbilt had everything simply enclosed in those few words, everything a man could really wish for.

“You’re going to England on business?” John asked.

“Going to buy hunting dogs,” Vanderbilt replied. He was well-known for his driving jaunts across several states, all dressed up in full English hunting gear. As John looked at him, he thought that Vanderbilt gave off a wonderful air; smooth, exquisitely dressed, handsome. He was resplendent in his riches and gave off the unmistakable aura of being in charge. A man’s man, a woman’s man. John watched him go, thinking he had all the luck in the world.

Never mind, he told himself. A person’s luck could change. His own was changing now: finding a direction. He realized that he never visualized himself going back across the Atlantic unless Octavia was with him. He had come to get her. It was as plain as that; his determination was increasing with every mile. And his father knew him better than he knew himself.

The night before he left, his father had called him into his study. “Now then, John,” he said, “Do what you have to do, and get out, and come home.”

“I shall be gone quite a few months,” he had replied.

“You’re thinking of staying until the war is over?”

“It could be over this year, who knows? But maybe not.”

“And, if not, you’ll stay out there?”

John had hesitated, and his father had come around his desk, looked him straight in the face, and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t break any hearts, John,” he had said. “Your own, or your mother’s, or anyone else’s.”

The message had been quite clear. “I’ve never wanted to disgrace you,” he had said. “I hope I never will.”

And they had stood in silence, neither speaking. Both knew that John didn’t see Octavia leaving William as a disgrace, but a deliverance. He was driven by wanting her happiness. Nothing else mattered. Not what people might say. Not what William Cavendish expected his wife to do. Not even—and he knew this himself, though didn’t like facing it—not even Octavia’s love for her own children, and her inability to leave them.

Whenever his thoughts butted up against this intractable problem, he simply rode over it with blinkered and dogged determination. The children could come with her. Or he would wait until they were a year or two older. Louisa might get married, and Harry, too. Charlotte was headstrong enough to leave home of her own accord. And what would Octavia do then, rattling around in Rutherford on her own, while William no doubt went off pursuing his own interests? No; sooner or later she would come with him. And she’d be able to come back to England at any time to see them, or they could come out to her.

Oh, but sometimes the pain of it. God, he had never known anything like it. This preoccupation with her that wrenched his soul; the need, the terrible awkward need that made him stagger. The strength of it was unnerving, and this fixation would have been incomprehensible—laughable even—before he had met her. He couldn’t explain it to men like Withington or Lauriat, because he knew that it would make him sound a fool. Perhaps he was a fool, though. She’d never sent him a word; wasn’t that evidence enough that she didn’t want to see him?

And then he would reassure himself. She was holding back, afraid to contact him, afraid to put what she felt on paper, afraid to look back at the happiness they had known. Still the doubts nagged at him. He would never rest until he could look in her face and see the expression in her eyes. He would know straightaway what it was that she really felt, instead of his being placed in this terrible no-man’s-land. “You think that I don’t want to live as we lived this summer?” she had asked him last year, with anguish in her voice. “You think that I want to lose that, to never have it again?” He must remember that and not doubt her, he told himself. He must remember it. And he did. By God, he thought, it was
all
he did, the only real way he spent his time. Remembering.

He looked over the rail and he wished himself closer. She ought to have got his letter by now:
Please God, let her send a message
, he thought. Let him have a message folded in his pocket like lucky Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt.

The water far below rippled in the evening light.

That night, there was a party in aid of Seamen’s Charities in the first-class saloon. When John walked in, he thought that there seemed to be a dismal air, even though the Welsh choir was singing. And, after them, a pianist played “I Love a Piano.” It was a new song, and John stopped to listen to it. He heard the soft eroticism in the words, about how the songwriter ran to the ivory keys to run his hands over them. “Who wrote this?” he asked Annie Matthews.

She was standing next to him with Robert, laughing, showing John the medal that Robert had won in the egg-and-spoon race on board. “Isn’t it silly?” she said. But she kissed it, and held it against her chest as if it were the most precious thing in the world. “Who wrote this?” she asked Robert now, passing on John’s question.

“Fellow called Berlin or Beilin. Irving Beilin, a Jew.”

“Isn’t it sweet?” she said.

“Rich Jew?” he asked Robert.

“Street boy,” Robert replied. “Or was, once.”

John had seen those boys. God alone knew how they survived. They were survivors of the Russian pogroms that Tsar Nicholas had encouraged; their families had swarmed across Europe to the haven of the good old US of A. The country with the open arms. And out of all that oppression came music like this. A dear little song about a piano.

“Lord,” John said, “the human race is resilient.”

Annie leaned on Robert’s shoulder, misty-eyed. “You can survive anything,” she said, and she exchanged a look with her husband. “All kinds of storms.”

But just as she spoke, the piano went silent, and the crowd parted. Captain Turner came into the room, glancing about him at the passengers with barely a trace of a smile. He wasn’t known for his bonhomie, but John was glad of that; he’d rather that a captain concentrated on his responsibilities than whoop it up at dinner or on the dance floor. Turner stepped up onto the small podium now, and a hush fell.

“No doubt you have heard,” he began, “of the warning of submarines in the area that we’re approaching.” No one said anything, no one even moved. Distantly, they could feel the thrum of the engines and hear the whispering rush of the waves. “We shall be entering the war zone tomorrow,” he continued slowly. “But the Royal Navy will look after us, and there’s no need for alarm.”

John stole a look at Annie Matthews several times during this speech. She seemed all right until she was told that there was no need for alarm, and then she blanched a little. John stared down then at his shoes. Saying that there was no need for alarm was like telling someone in a doctor’s surgery that there was no need for worry; they might not have been worried until that moment, but the very mention of the word put the thought in their heads.
Don’t say alarm
, he thought wryly to himself.
And for God’s sake don’t mention the word “sinking.”

Thankfully, the captain did not. He continued in the same measured, somber tone. “We shall go ahead at full speed tomorrow,” he said. “And arrive in Liverpool in good time.” A murmur of positivity and a few smiles went through the crowd. But the good feeling was rapidly extinguished by the parting shot as the captain got down from the podium. “May I remind male passengers not to light their cigarettes on deck tonight,” the captain said. “No need to advertise our position.”

“Lord above,” John heard Robert Matthews murmur.

Annie’s grip on her husband’s arm tightened.

As he turned to go, John heard another woman say, “I’m sleeping in my clothes on the boat deck. Tell the steward to bring me a blanket.”

Her companion murmured by way of reply, “Sleeping? You’ll manage to do that?”

When John got to his cabin, he looked about him at the seeming solidity of the room: the gilding on the mirror, the thick feather coverlet on the bed, the washbasin and mirror and the white paneled walls. The light holder with its two electric candles. The curtain on the door held back with a tasseled rope. It all looked so perfectly sound: untouchable, indestructible. But it was not solid and it was not sound and it was not indestructible. They were on water, and they were, as the captain had said, in a war zone.

He stood before the mirror and started to take off his clothes, and he saw that his hands were shaking. He stopped, and decided to lie down as he was, and pull the coverlet over him. He had always been afraid of drowning, and the old terror now seemed to rush over him all at once. He tried to steady himself, but as he took a few deep breaths he suddenly noticed that a lifejacket had been laid out on the end of the bed, and an exclamation of black humor, an exasperated laugh, escaped him. “Who the devil put that there?” he muttered. Had it been the steward? And why? Because of the captain’s announcement? Was it a general order, or simply the anxiety of his particular crew member for these cabins? He didn’t know. He hardly liked to think about a steward who might be more nervous than he was.

John sighed, staring at it. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” But he knew in his gut that it certainly did. He had not touched the damned ugly thing before now out of sheer superstition; but now it seemed to occupy double its rightful space. It looked huge: cumbersome and complicated. He reached out a tentative hand and touched it, thinking that he ought to try it on, to make sure how to tie it. Just in case. Just in case . . .

“Lord,” he muttered, grimacing as he picked it up. “Just get us there. Get us there quickly.”

*   *   *

I
t began to rain. Soft, soft beautiful rain that they could hear dripping slowly from the roof.

They were some two or three miles from Rutherford, high up in the moorland. They had come there separately, Louisa from the front of the house, and some time later Jack walking from the farthest point of the meadows, his track describing a wide loop northwards. Only when the roof of Rutherford was out of sight did he at last turn back and climb steadily upwards.

Louisa was already there, sitting quietly, when he arrived. They had said very little to each other, for nothing needed to be said. They sat hand in hand, her head on his shoulder, gazing at the sunken path and the moor beyond, until the misty cloud of rain had come. The windows in the ruined cottage were low to the ground, and the place smelled of the centuries of wood that had once been stored here: oak and cedar. It used to be a stopping place once, on the track over the top of the moors for those coming from the west and over the Pennines.

There was a kind of rough bench in one corner, and a hearth that was now stopped with debris—leaves and nests that had gradually fallen down the narrow chimney. But the cottage had no use now, and Rutherford’s land enclosed it and it had decayed, sinking into the rising swathes of gorse, the roof bowed.

There was a drystone wall, put up many years before—probably two or three hundred years ago, its mossy base still intact but the upper stones cracked by frost and tumbled down; but it must have enclosed a garden once, a patch of green. There were speedwell and campion all over it, and up through the mass of heather and knotted turf and pink flowers came two or three incongruous dahlia, rosettes of lurid orange.

They listened to the rain falling on campion, gorse, and broken stone together. Gradually then—after an hour or more—they could see the sky change and become lighter. But the summer rain didn’t stop. Light came through the dripping division of the window, and color fell across the floor: blue, indigo, and violet.

“The far end of the rainbow,” Louisa murmured. She lifted her head and looked at him. “That is where we are,” she said. “Way down in the receding colors, in shadows. Hiding here together.”

“Nay,” he told her. “Never in shadow. In the light, and all kinds of difference through it.”

“That’s one way to see it.”

“I do see it,” he told her. And he always would see those colors softly shedding across the flagstones. There was the color of speedwell in those blues: there was plenty of it outside in the small sweet faces of the flowers pushing through the grass. Mary’s flower, his mother called it, for a reason he had never understood.

“Speedwell,” Louisa said, as if she had read his thoughts. “The shade there, in the center.” She smiled. “It’s called ‘men’s faithfulness,’ too.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the petals fall off very quickly,” she said. “As quickly as a man’s faithfulness. There is a book in my father’s library. A botanical book.”