The Wild Dark Flowers (8 page)

It’s pretty darn good, Octavia
, he wrote.
There’s a fine deck all around it looking toward the sea, real deep so that it could take a sofa and chairs. The eaves come low. I’ve ordered storm lanterns, a very nice kind, and plain. Can you imagine how beautiful they’ll be, all lit up at dusk? The grass has been bleached right down by the winter, though. Perhaps it was a mistake. Mother recommends sea grass so that the house would simply be part of the shore. I wonder what you would say I should plant to give color out here or if you would say that she’s right. . . .

Octavia had never replied to him. Not once. She did not trust herself to put pen to paper. She was afraid it would be a letter of despair. But her silence had not dissuaded him; John Gould just kept on writing.

She couldn’t blame William for their situation. She couldn’t bring herself to blame anyone. It was simply a dire dead end that they all found themselves in. She knew that William felt it, too. Last Christmas he had done his utmost to try to change things.

He had made an enormous effort to make Rutherford charming. He had invited a large number of guests; he had, to her surprise, brought in actors and musicians to entertain them at New Year. He had told her—he had told everyone—that the home fires must literally be kept burning; that the season must be celebrated in the face of all the horrors across the Channel. It was an act of defiance, Octavia surmised; and, in the midst of their own long winter, their own long standoff, she rather admired him for it.

As if to underline his determined optimism, he gave her presents that had made her gasp with their extravagance. A full-length sable coat had come from Debenham & Freebody in Wigmore Street, lavishly boxed, nestling in soft layers of tissue and silk. On Christmas Day, in her own bedroom, she had woken to find that he had himself made a little Christmas stocking and placed it on the foot of her bed. It had contained an exquisite leather-bound volume of Amy Lowell’s
A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass
. She was both perplexed and intrigued, for William did not like poetry, and the author was American. After Gould, he had good reason to despise the country. On the flyleaf, he had written,
To Octavia, Christmas 1914.
There had been no other words. Not
to my dearest wife
, or even
to my wife.

He had come to her room before breakfast, while Amelie was styling Octavia’s hair, and looked at her in the dressing mirror like a blushing schoolboy. She had indicated the book. “This is very nice,” she said. She felt embarrassed; he was not a man for little trifles like this, or affectionate gestures. He had actually shuffled his feet while Amelie carried on curling and setting with a small smile on her face. “I hear she is quite the thing,” he told her. “I thought you might like it.”

Actually, she had not liked Lowell’s poetry much. But one poem had haunted her. It was about petals cast on water and being carried away out of sight, and the necessity of remaining while the petals made their own unmarked journey. It echoed her own life. She had stayed, while Gould went away. William had stayed, while his one-time mistress, Helen de Montfort, was stranded, in who knew what circumstances, in Paris. She and William were both the spectators at the drifting sections of their life, or they were the petals themselves, helplessly carried in a greater current. None of them had what they really wanted. What they had had before was gone; what they had now made no real, feeling sense. But they went through the days. That was the most that could be said for it. They went through their days.

Octavia had gone down to breakfast on Christmas morning, and felt moved enough to kiss William on the cheek and take his arm while they stood waiting for Louisa and Charlotte and their guests. “You are very thoughtful,” she had murmured. “I hope you continue to think so,” he replied, and struck the old formality of pose that she was used to.

And so they lived, and continued to live, in this strange detachment. She had told herself that she must get used to it. She told herself that she was inordinately lucky to be living at Rutherford when so many struggled in worse circumstances, that she was lucky that her husband—a man who, only a few years ago would have considered her own affair grounds for punishment or divorce, whatever his own infidelities—seemed to have forgiven her. That he now allowed her to at least superficially make decisions in the running of Blessington. But just occasionally—and the issue of new housing for the workers was one of them—her temper got the better of her, and William’s reluctance to build infuriated her.

“We are making a fortune from this war,” she had blurted out that night after dinner two months ago. “Don’t we owe it, morally, to Blessington to at least provide decent houses?”

William’s expression had darkened suddenly. “I don’t care to be lectured on morals,” he had replied.

She had steadfastly ignored the veiled warning that she was trespassing on delicate ground. She tried to keep her voice level. “It is an injustice,” she carried on. “Many of the men who have left those hovels will never come back. Their wives are doing their work, and their children. The least we can do is provide them with a good place to lay their heads.”

William had glanced at Bradfield, whose impervious face as he stood by the door of the dining room betrayed no clue that he heard Octavia’s tone of voice.

“I think, my dear, that it smacks of hysteria to say that many of the men will not come back,” William said. She felt the blood rush to her face, a mixture of embarrassment and anger.

“But”—William continued in the placatory way that she knew of old, the tone that she had always found patronizing and which she struggled not to interpret as such—“it is very touching that you think of the families. We shall see what’s to be done.”

She had taken a deep breath. “Yes,” she told him. “We shall indeed.”

Octavia found herself staring at the floor. She tore her gaze away from the complicated pattern of the Indian carpet and glanced back at the bed, and the bluebirds, and the old family portraits lining the walls—every eighteenth- and nineteenth-century face seeming to carry an expression of superior criticism as they glared down at her.

“Damn you all,” she murmured softly in their direction. “You cannot touch me. I am half a world away.”

*   *   *

M
ary Richards walked out into the sunshine, carrying the curtains in her arms.

In the small yard between the kitchen garden and the house, rails had been set up to take the ironed laundry and the curtains taken from two of the guest suites. Mrs. Jocelyn came out, watched the material spread, and watched the village laundry maids sprinkle the sheets with lavender water. She took several of the pieces between thumb and forefinger while the housemaids stood behind her. “Let them air for an hour, then take them upstairs,” she instructed. She looked them over critically, trying to find fault with their appearance.

Then, apparently satisfied, she turned on her heel. “I shall take my tea, and be on the stairs at four,” she said. “Don’t keep me waiting. In the meantime, unfold all the sheets from the linen closets that I left in the laundry room. Shake them out, air them for half an hour, and refold them.”

Mary watched the housekeeper go. At the door to the house, she saw Mrs. Jocelyn take hold of the doorframe for a second or two too long. She wiped the edge of her thumb along it, then reached up and did the same to the top of the door. Finding nothing to reprimand the girls for, she disappeared inside.

Mary looked at Jenny. “She’s getting dafter,” Mary commented dryly.

Jenny smiled. “Best not say it.”

“She is, though. I saw her going along the corridor to the kitchen. It were like a little dance. She’ll take a step forward and two back at each light. Don’t you see her? Right peculiar.”

“Did she always?”

“Not that I remember. Just these last few weeks.”

Jenny shrugged. Mrs. Jocelyn inhabited another world, as removed from them as Mars, and just as unfathomable. They went to the laundry room. In the gloom of the house, the small annex behind the kitchens was full of steam and the smell of starch. Yesterday had been wash day, and today the girls brought in from the village labored at pressing every piece of clothing and linen that had dried. The nearest looked up as Mary entered. “It’s bad enough doing the regular without the fookin’ curtains,” she complained. “They was done after Christmas. She’s gone off her head.”

Mary had to bite back a smile, because the girl was right; however, she was far senior to a village laundry maid, and it wouldn’t do to agree, or laugh at her language. “Just get on with it,” she retorted, taking from the pile of sheets.

Once the linen was on the rails in the sunlight, Mary and Jenny paused, hands on hips. “I wonder where David is now,” she murmured. “I wonder when he’ll get here.”

“Is he off to Southampton afterwards?”

“No. Shropshire. More training.”

“They say when all the Kitchener volunteers get out to France, it’ll end the war.”

Mary considered awhile before replying. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “I expect they volunteer in Germany, too.”

“You don’t think we’ll beat them?” Jenny answered, aghast. “That’s not a very patriotic thing to say, is it?”

The two of them leaned against the wall of the house, shutting their eyes against the glare of the sun for a moment or two. Mary muttered, “That’s what we’re supposed to be, is it? Good old decent British, aren’t we? They say ‘murdering Hun,’ don’t they—but what do you think
we’re
doing out there?”

She opened her eyes to find Jenny staring at her doubtfully. “But we’re in the right. We didn’t start it.”

Mary laughed shortly. “And they think the same, I don’t doubt. They’ll have been told they
had
to do it. Invade Belgium and France. To right some sort of wrong, I expect.”

“Mary,” Jenny whispered. “You’ll get yourself in trouble talking like that. What would his lordship say?”

“Yes,” Mary agreed. “So I keep my mouth shut. But don’t expect me out there waving and smiling and saying what jolly good fun it all is, because I won’t. Harrison might like it . . .”

“He can’t wait to hunt them down,” Jenny whispered. “Like the hunt goes after foxes, he says. Ain’t that horrible, though?”

“I told you,” Mary replied. “When you first came here last year—he’s a strange one. You can never tell what’s really on his mind.”

Jenny raised her eyes. “Do you think he will? Kill someone, I mean?”

“It’s a war, isn’t it?” Mary replied. “What do you think they do to Germans? Dance with them?”

Jenny sat down abruptly on the low wall just inside the kitchen garden. “Really kill someone,” she murmured. “Not to play at it. To kill someone just like them. It don’t seem right.”

“That’s what it is, though. That’s what I’m saying to you.”

“My brother’s gone. My younger one, Georgie. He’s sixteen.”

“Sixteen? That’s not allowed.”

Jenny played with the tie of her apron, frowning. “He lied to the recruitment officer, and he lied to Ma that they wouldn’t take him—said that he was just going along to the hall as a joke. But he went ahead and signed the paper. My ma went along and complained, but they showed her the form. She’s got no birth certificate. She can’t proper remember like, what year he was born. But he says eighteen, and he’s big, you know? Six foot two. So they took him. Ma says they must be getting desperate.”

“He must be keen.”

“Yes, but I don’t know how he’ll get on. Georgie couldn’t tie his own shoelaces till he was eight, he’s that clumsy.” Jenny gave out a great ragged sigh. “Just a big bloomin’ ox, he is, and twice as stupid. He says it’ll take more than a bullet to stop him, but a bullet would stop anyone, wouldn’t it? He doesn’t believe it. He thinks he’ll just get up and go on.” Her voice dropped.

Out beyond her, Mary could see the sun shining on the neat rows of bean sticks, yards and yards of them in military formation. She thought of men lined up in rows like that, but with no sun shining on them, and no heavy peace weighing on them until the lines seemed asleep in the long, drowsy afternoon.

“It’s like he don’t understand,” Jenny was saying. “And there’s more than bullets, ain’t there? My friend’s brother went out on a raid at night, and he never come back. They don’t know where he is. He just never come back. They say he’s missing. Not alive and not dead, just ‘missing.’”

She got up now and stood beside Mary, looking out at the kitchen garden. “His father got up out of his bed—he’s been ailing a year—and he got dressed and he went down to Stepney and asked what it meant,” she said softly. “He went out every day and he collapsed in the street and they took him to the hospital and he’s there yet. And he keeps saying, “My boy’s missing.” Just keeps saying it. I mean, how could they lose anyone? Why don’t they know?” Her voice wavered.

Mary caught hold of Jenny’s hand. “Your brother will be all right.”

“Oh, Mary,” Jenny whispered. “Ain’t it all so awful, though?”

“We just won’t think about it,” Mary told her resolutely. “We won’t talk about it and we won’t think about it, neither Nash nor Harrison nor Georgie nor any of them.”

“No,” Jenny echoed unconvincingly.

“And we’ll just get on with it.”

“Yes, we’ll get on with it.” And the two girls looked at each other, each with a brightly despairing smile.

Suddenly, from the house, they heard a reedy voice singing. The door to the laundry and kitchen corridor swung open, and Alfred, the hallboy, came striding out into the sunshine, covered from head to foot in coal dust. He was grinning, carrying a slab of bread and butter in his grimy fist.

Mary looked at him severely. “Where’d you get that?”

“Ay-up,” he greeted her casually. “Cook give it me.”

“And look at the state of you!”

He shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“I know
you
don’t care, you barmpot,” Mary retorted. “But you get one dot of soot on those sheets and I’ll string you up.”

Alfred shoved the last of the bread into his mouth. He shuffled off across the yard, swinging his arms haphazardly. He made a clumsy attempt to march up and down among the waste bins, where he picked up a stick and balanced it on one shoulder. “I’m going to be a soldier,” he said.