Good Hope Road: A Novel (43 page)

The grass had grown in while they’d been away and was beginning to crowd the trunks of the trees. Bending, he started automatically to weed. There was a simple satisfaction in the task, in the sharpness of the blades of grass, the cool brush of earth against his hands. The Major paused, slowly rubbing a clod between his fingers.

When he was a child, the family had summered one year in Cape Cod. It had been an idyllic time, of sun-warmed waves, of building sandcastles with Bill while their nanny read aloud to them, of all the shrimp a boy could eat and combing the beach for sea glass. At the end of the holiday, he’d brought back a small scoop of sand in his trunk, a secret souvenir that he’d not even told Bill about. He mixed the sand into the soil of the orchard. For some reason, they never did make it out there again. The nanny eventually left too, but when he walked about the orchard afterwards, he’d sometimes thought of that handful of seashore and smiled.

It so satisfied him, the quiet sentimentality of the gesture, that he’d repeated it over the years. Loess from Mexico. The red earth of Hawaii. A handful of Shropshire sod. Trench mud packed into a Boche helmet, the bullet hole plugged with cork. All carted home and sifted into this New England soil, a private mapping of his life, like the silver tracings of a snail.

The Major wished he’d brought back some of the mud from Anacostia. Things had happened so quickly . . . He was overcome again by the sense of powerlessness that had assailed him ever since the night of the evacuation. A sense of failure so acute it cut through the fog of alcohol, stressing upon him yet again of how little consequence he was. Like the discarded husk from a seed pod, emptied of worth. He sat down heavily in the grass, uncaring of its wetness. He pressed his hands into the topsoil. The earth yielding, but firm, steady beneath his fingers. A physical anchor to a world he’d given up trying to understand.

Jim told his father about his proposal, and Madeleine’s acceptance. The Major nodded, aware that he ought to say something in response, but unsure what that ought to be. ‘Excellent. She – she’s a wonderful girl.’ Rising from the armchair with some effort, he held out a congratulatory hand.

A few hours later, Jim came upon a round box of midnight-blue velvet resting on the breakfast table. In it, the asscher cut diamond ring that his mother had worn for all her wedded life. He rubbed a finger over the ring and the stone shot to life against the warmth of his skin, casting a solitary spark that hung trembling and rainbow-faceted all along the opposite wall. Jim looked through the open windows, at the quiet figure working among the apple trees, watching as a breeze gusted through the Major’s scant hair, exposing the vulnerable pinkness of scalp below.

Caught up in the swell of public support for the Anacostia victims, the
Gazette
called to ask if the Major could resubmit some of his previous editorials.

‘Why don’t you speak with them?’ Jim urged.

The Major said nothing, wholly absorbed in a patch of dandelions, in the spores beginning one by one to detach themselves from their moorings with such enviable ease.

Jim brought down the tan leather folder where he’d secretly saved every single one of the articles that his father had written. He sat in the library, riffling through the pages. As he turned the sheets filled with precise, copperplate script, rereading a line here, a paragraph there, Jim had the odd sensation of holding something sacral in his hands. In the aftermath of Anacostia, there was a poignancy to his father’s words that had eluded him before. To get them published now seemed whorish, as if catering to cheap sentiment. Jim put the folder away.

Despite the brevity of the courtship, Madeleine’s parents met the news of her impending nuptials with remarkable equanimity. Her father had rather liked Jim from the start, and her long-suffering mother was secretly relieved to be getting her daughter off her hands. Madeleine wanted to be married in the fall, just as the leaves were turning, she explained, twisting Jim’s mother’s ring on her finger this way and that, admiring it as it caught the light.

Freddie went into a fit of sulks when he heard about the wedding. ‘Surely you don’t expect me to attend,’ he said. Madeleine kissed him on the cheek and said he’d better be there.

‘How about I just fly my plane into the belfry instead?’ he suggested morosely and she laughed.

‘It won’t last, you know,’ he predicted with gloomy satisfaction. She smacked him lightly on the head and told him not to be such a sore loser.

When the wedding date was set, her parents placed a call to the Major. Would he send them his list of invitees, her father asked jovially.

The Major was nonplussed. There was no need for a list since it’d probably be just the four of them attending, including the groom, he said. Misunderstanding the surprised silence at the other end: ‘It’s Ellie and her kid,’ he elaborated, ‘she’s been a surrogate mother to Jim . . .’ What was that? Yes, only four, but perhaps Jim had some folks he wanted to invite. No, there was no other family. There were his wife’s relatives in England, but he hadn’t been in contact with them for years.

Madeleine wanted to know which of Jim’s friends would be attending. ‘None,’ he shrugged. There were some folks from the local school he was still friendly with, but nobody he especially wanted to be there, he said. His college roommate perhaps, but he hadn’t been in touch since graduation; the same went for his football teammates. It was Madeleine’s turn to be taken aback. Now that she thought about it, although he seemed to know practically everyone each time they went into Raydon, Jim had never spoken of any particular friends.

‘Just another thing that’s passed down through the Stonebridge men,’ he said caustically when she pointed it out to him. ‘We like being left alone.’

Seeing him begin to bristle at her questioning, she let it go.

‘I wish Connor and some of those guys could’ve come,’ he said suddenly.

‘Connor, from Anacostia?’ Madeleine looked at him surprised. Her expression softened. ‘I wish so too,’ she agreed.

The wedding invitations arrived, embossed with a scrolling font on an ivory background. The first thing that Ellie did upon receiving hers was to head on over to the country store and wave it under Carla Dalloway’s nose. Well,
of course
she’d been invited. She’d practically raised the boy, hadn’t she? Yes, all the way to Boston!

Old Asaph and Jeremiah listened interestedly to the exchange from their seats on the porch.

‘The Stonebridge boy be getting hitched,’ old Asaph observed.

‘Ayuh,’ Jeremiah concurred. ‘Right bonny little thing she is, his flatlander girl.’

‘Very pretty,’ Asaph agreed. ‘Reckon she’ll get the flatlander bits ironed out of her soon enough too, here in Raydon.’

There was a spate of celebratory soirees in Boston in the weeks leading up to the wedding, thrown by a seemingly endless procession of Madeleine’s friends. Jim excused himself from most of them – the apple harvest was upon them, he pointed out. The few he did attend, he gamely endured, nursing a beer and standing resolutely by her side. When the inane chatter became too much, he put an arm around her waist, steering her to the dance floor.

‘You dance?’ she asked astonished as he twirled her expertly around.

‘My mother.’

‘She did a fine job teaching you, Jim Stonebridge.’ She reached up to kiss his neck. ‘I could get used to this.’

He grinned, pleased both with the compliment and this respite from the crowd.

They were married in late September, in the midst of a gentle fall, when Black Pete emerged once more from the woods with sacks of puffballs and a huge cluster of oyster mushrooms to sell, the coats of the horses starting to thicken while they ambled peaceably about the paddock, or stood in thoughtful contemplation of the red and orange hills.

The day of the wedding was as beautiful a day as anyone could remember, the trees outside the church a blaze of colour that matched the vibrancy of the bride’s hair. She wore it in a low knot, its marcelled waves fastened at the side with a diamanté pin that had belonged to her grandmother. In the bouquet of freesias and orchids she carried was a single peacock feather. It was her ‘something blue’, she said, pointing out the cobalt among its many hues.

The groom had touchingly chosen his father to be his best man.

Ellie made no pretence of trying to hide her tears, noisily honking into her handkerchief all the way through the ceremony.

Madeleine bought him a gold watch as a wedding gift. Jim was embarrassed and admitted he had nothing for her; she was put out at first, but then she laughed.

He set a trap line later that season, following a gully along a river bottom into a thick belt of wooded land. He trapped three foxes and skinned them himself, curing the pelts in the woodshed before sending them to a furrier in New York. When the package arrived, he stuffed it under their bed, bringing it out late that night.

Delighted, she tried the cape on, still naked, a faint glisten of sweat on her midriff and between the slope of her breasts. She posed before him, a hand on one hip. With her hair tumbling about her shoulders, she looked to Jim like a magnificent, wilding queen.

Amused to hear how miffed Carla Dalloway had been about not receiving an invite to the wedding,‘Why don’t we host a reception?’ Madeleine suggested.

Ellie was thrilled at the prospect of a party in the house after so many years. Jim hesitated, glancing at his father. Madeleine slipped her arm through the Major’s. ‘It will be such a pleasant affair,’ she urged, smiling, ‘If you’d only agree, please would you?’ The Major haltingly did.

They settled upon an elaborate tea. Ellie was busy in the kitchen for days. She showed Madeleine the rows of trunks in the cellar where the carved girandoles, the crystal and the good china had been kept in storage. They dragged it all upstairs where Ellie set about cleaning and polishing the pieces, soaking the crystal in soap suds to fully restore its sparkle.

Tables were set out in the orchard, under the green of the apple trees, the boughs of the Astrakhans and Porters heavy with ripening fruit. Madeleine foraged among the harvested apples, heaping mounds of the best in bowls of carved malachite and on massive, silver-footed trays.

‘Nobody’s going to eat that many apples,’ Jim pointed out, bemused, to Madeleine.

‘Those are the centrepieces, silly,’ she replied, laughing.

The afternoon was an undisputed success. The Major slipped away almost as soon as the tea began, disappearing into the high reaches of the orchard where mercifully, the sounds of the revelry carried only faintly. Carla Dalloway pressed a bolt of cloth into Madeleine’s hands. It was a wedding gift, she said, adding that the house and the grounds had never looked prettier, not even from when she remembered it as a girl.

It warmed Ellie’s heart to witness Jim’s small, throwaway gestures of tenderness towards his bride.

‘Provence roses!’ she heard Madeleine exclaim, over the row of bushes by the kitchen one morning. They had been particularly late blooming this year, and while the roses had all fallen now, there were still small piles of petals here and there on the ground.

‘Cabbage roses,’ he countered, just to be difficult. ‘No need to get all fancy, cabbage roses is what we call them around here.’

He took the beauty out of everything, she said indignantly. Besides, whatever was this obsession with cabbage in these parts? Boiled cabbage, skunk cabbage, even this lovely flower . . .

Worried that Madeleine might not understand his particular brand of jesting, not just yet, Ellie almost called out to him from the kitchen window to stop being so ornery. She held her tongue though, watching as he plucked a sprig of leaves, carefully stripping its stalk of thorns before tucking it behind Madeleine’s ear.

‘“A rose by any other name . . .’

‘. . . would smell as sweet,”’ Madeleine finished, smiling as she raised a hand to lightly touch the sprig in her hair.

The Major, Ellie continued to worry about in private, pulling out the bottles from all of his hiding places when he was outdoors, and monitoring just how much of the liquor he’d consumed.

In the presidential elections that November, Roosevelt and the Democrats won a resounding victory over President Hoover. This was the first election since 1876 in which the Democratic candidate won the popular vote, and the first since 1852 in which he was declared the winner in the Electoral College as well. It was the Depression of course, but the tipping point, the pundits unanimously agreed, had been the appalling handling of the veterans and the Bonus March by the previous administration.

Ellie was certain the Major would be as pleased as punch at the news, but he only nodded vaguely when he heard. Seeing Ellie’s worried eyes on him, he pulled on his gloves and avoided her gaze. Muttering something about needing to see to the Red Astrakhans, the Major retreated outdoors and spent the day among his trees once more.

1933

brisk wind rattled the walls of the lean-to, whistling through the cracks. Connor muttered in his sleep, drawing the sheets of newspaper close. The wind blew harder still, gathering speed along the frosted banks of the Hudson then slamming into the shack. He woke with a start, cursing under his breath.