Phoenix and Ashes (39 page)

She
bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to throw him into this slough of despair,
and the worst of it was, she couldn’t disagree with him.

And
there didn’t seem to be anything she could say to make any difference. Or
at least, nothing that wasn’t at least partly a lie.

“I’m
sorry, Reggie,” she said, finally. “I didn’t mean to—to
remind you.”

He
looked up, and at least he didn’t try to smile. “I don’t know
how any of us can get through the course of a day without being
reminded,” he said, quietly. “You have to be lying to yourself, I
suppose, or purposefully blinding yourself. Like the people who can’t
seem to find anything to talk about except how hard it is to find a good
servant or the impossibility of getting a good chop. Anything except about
what’s across the Channel.”

“But
there are good things left, still,” she replied, forcing herself to
rally, and trying harder now to give him some sense of hope. “I
can’t see that it’s wrong to remember
that
. Pretending the
bleak things don’t exist is wrong, and not trying to do something about
them is worse yet, but it can’t be wrong to also remember that there is
still joy, still a little peace, still things to laugh about, and still
love.” She felt her voice faltering, but forced herself to carry on,
hoping that she didn’t sound too maudlin. “If we forget
that
,
we’ll lose hope, too.”

“Ah,
hope,” he said, his voice growing a little lighter. And he did manage a
smile. “Hope, the last spirit left in Pandora’s jar, after she let
all the troubles and plagues of the world out.”

“And
she let hope fly free, too,” Eleanor said softly. “Because when all
is said and done, hope is sometimes all that keeps us from surrendering to despair.”

He
heaved a great sigh, and nodded. “That is as true a thing as I think you
have ever said,” he told her. “You’re quite right, and right
to remind me. No, we mustn’t lose hope; if we do that—”

He
looked off into the distance again, but this time as if he was actually looking
for
something, and not to avoid her gaze.

Perhaps—hope?

“If
we do that,” he repeated, quietly, as if he was telling
himself
a great truth “We really shall be utterly lost, and there will be no
turning back for any of us.”

She shivered.
Because that had sounded altogether less like an aphorism, and far more like a
prophecy.

May 2, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

LITTLE ELEANOR DID
HER DISAPPEARING act not long after the quarrel had foundered and crashed,
leaving Reggie alone in the meadow, staring glumly after her. The stupid words
he’d said, the bitter ones she had responded with, still hung in the air.
Nothing was resolved, except, perhaps, she seemed genuinely sorry she had
thrown him into a mental funk, and he was genuinely sorry he hadn’t
thought before he’d spoken.

In
fact, in retrospect, he hadn’t been at all observant. He’d been so
preoccupied with his own thoughts—well, that was a kind way of saying
he’d been paying no attention to anything outside of himself. It should
have been obvious that her circumstances were changed, drastically, from the
last time he had seen her, before the war—her clothing alone should have
told him that.

He
gulped, as something else occurred to him.
Oh, hell. I’ve put my foot
in it, well and truly
. She had every intention, the last time he saw her,
of going to Oxford, and her father had clearly had the means to send her. Her
clothing had been good, she had mentioned tutors and special studies in order
to pass the entrance qualifications, so although all Reggie knew about her
father was that he was a well-off manufacturer, there was certainly money to
spare in their household. But her father had been an early casualty of the war,
and where had that left her? Had his businesses gone to pieces? So many
businesses had—either wrecked without a supervisory hand on the tiller,
or collapsed because the war effort siphoned off more and more in the way of
manpower and resources until there was no way to keep going.

So—now
she was poor. Having to work for a living—that much was obvious from her
clothing and her hands. Probably she was a maid somewhere in the village or the
surrounding farms—the
servant
of one of those shopkeepers’
or farmers’ daughters whose intelligence and expectations he had so
maligned.

And
he had babbled on about scholarships for the boys, when she, so quick, so
intelligent, with all of her dreams and expectations blighted, had sat there
and let him blather fatuously about what he was going to do for boys he
didn’t even know—

And
he had thought that he was being her friend. She assuredly was his—and
look how he had treated her!
Oh, very clever, Reg. Take a juicy chop and
dangle it in front of someone who’s been dining on crusts, then tell her
she can’t have it
. He felt sick, absolutely sick as a cat. No wonder
she’d blown up at him. He could not possibly have managed anything more
cruel if he’d set out to torture her on purpose.

And
now, of course, he had set things up so that if he offered her a scholarship,
he would look as if he was humoring her, patronizing her. Throwing her crumbs
out of misplaced pity, even though he didn’t think she had any future
other than as the wife of a menial laborer and that any education given her
would be wasted. Or worse, as if it didn’t matter if he offered her a
scholarship because he didn’t expect her to last out the first term.

You
really are a prize idiot
.

She
would probably never come back here again after this. And he wouldn’t
blame her. Why would she care to continue to befriend someone who treated her
so shabbily?

But
then, guilt turned to irritation. Hang it all, this was at least her fault in
part! Why hadn’t she simply said something about her current straitened
circumstances? She didn’t have to
ask
for help, but if she had
just
said
something about not having the money to go to Oxford, well,
of course he would have jumped in with an offer to help her out! Why did
females have to be so confounded complicated! He was in hearty sympathy with
Bernard Shaw’s Henry Higgins…

Except
that he was also in hearty sympathy with Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle.
Actually, more so than with Higgins, if it came down to cases. Guilt
resurfaced. Why
should
she say anything about her current state? It
wasn’t as if he had any right to know—and it must be profoundly
shaming to her.

Torn
between guilt and exasperation, he did the only thing a man of sense would do
at such a time. He went in search of his motorcar and a drink.

The
first was easy enough to find, as it was parked just off the road where he had
left it. The second lay no further away than Broom, and his haven of the Broom
Pub.

By
now, he was one of the regulars; he was well aware that three years ago, he
would never have been accepted as a regular in here if he had been coming for
ten years straight. The class differences between himself and the men who made
this their refuge would have been too much of a chasm to bridge. But the war
made more than strange bedfellows, it made comrades of strangers sharing the
same suffering, and moreover, he had, from the beginning, tried to leave the
lord of the manor at the door. So he was welcomed for himself, as well as for
the fact he could be counted on to buy more than his share of rounds, and in
that haven of resolute masculinity, he felt his spirit soothed and his guilt
eased the moment he crossed the threshold.

Good
beer was balm for the soul, and a good barman has, by convivial nature and
training in his trade, as great a fund of wisdom as any counselor and often
quite a bit more than most clerics. Tom Brennan was such a barman, and his
“gents” felt completely at ease in unloading their woes within his
walls.

It
is as probable as the sun rising that when fellow sufferers meet together over
drinks, before the evening is out, one of them will say “Women!” in
that particular suffering tone that makes his fellow creatures shake their
heads and murmur sympathetically until the particular grievance emerges.

Reggie
had every intention of being the sufferer that evening, but one of the others
beat him to it.

Joseph
Atherton’s hour of discontent was made evident by his heavy footsteps as
he pushed open the door. He ordered his pint, took a long draught of it, and as
the rest waited and listened in expectation, the cause of his unhappiness was
revealed.

“Women!”
said Farmer Joe, with unusual vehemence.

Murmurs
of sympathy all around, intended to encourage more revelation.

“I
mean!” he continued, aggrieved, “A fellow’s got enough to do
in his day, don’t he? And when she
says
that May Day is all
stuff and nonsense, and that she don’t hold with sech childish
farradiddle, a fellow’s got a right to take her at her word, don’t
he? I mean! Cows need milkin’, stock needs feedin’, and
there’s enough to do without muckin’ about gettin’ a lot of
silly flowers,
and
on the day of fair and school treat, no less, and
all them tents and kiddies to be hauled up t’ manor!”

With
those words, it all came clear to every man in the pub. Clearly, Mrs.Tina had
been expecting to get her May Day tribute, no matter what she had said to the
contrary. Clearly, what with young Adam being the sort to
“volunteer” his father’s services—Joseph having one of
the few farm horses old enough to have escaped being “conscripted,”
but young enough to do his work—Joseph had found himself dragooned
unwilling into helping out on top of an already heavy workload.

And
clearly, when the aforementioned May Day tribute did not materialize, Mrs.Tina
had made her displeasure known. Which was probably why Joe was here, and not
sitting down to his dinner.

“Unfair,
that’s what it is,” replied another farmer, Albert Norman.
“How’s a man to guess, when they say one thing, and mean the
opposite?”

“Or
when they don’t say anything at all,” Reggie put in, with feeling.
“And they expect you to somehow
understand
what’s going on
in their heads without any clue! And
then
when you blunder into some
hideous mistake, they turn on you!”

“That’s
a fact,” Joseph sighed. Albert nodded glumly.

“Dunno
why they can’t just say straight out what they want.” A new country
heard from: Michael Van, off in the corner with Mad Ross. “I mean!
Tha’s
logical
, ain’t it? Do
we
go around
sayin’ one thing and meanin’ the contrariwise?”

Reggie
nodded along with the others, and signaled for another pint.

“You
say to a girl,” said young Albert, to no one in particular, “You
say, ‘a feller I know was wonderin’ if you’re seein’
anyone in particaler,’ an’
she
says, ‘no, not in
particaler,’ and you get all set to—to see if she’d
like
to be seein’ anyone in particaler, and then you turns around, and whup,
there she is,
at
fair,
with
another feller, with all the
parish t’ see! So if she ain’t
with
‘im, then
why’s she actin’ like she’s
with
‘im, is what
I want to know!”

More
shaking of heads. “Can’t account for it,” said Michael Van.
“And you’d think, wouldn’t you, if you’d offended some
‘un, they’d tell you, wouldn’t you?” He appealed to
Ross. “If I said something that made you mad, you’d say!”

“I’d
say,” Mad Ross replied, with a glint in his eye. “Or I’d
punch your nose. Either way, you’d know.”

“So
there’s no call to be mad at a body if he’s said summat you
didn’t like, and you didn’t
tell
him, is there?”
Michael continued, sounded aggrieved. “And ‘specially if it was
months and months ago, and you never said, till it’s too late for him to
remember what he
did
say, much less why you should be mad about
it!”

“That’s
a fact,” replied Albert.

“My
round, I think,” Reggie said.

Reggie
would have liked to air his own grievance—but with his nerves rawly
sensitive, he didn’t want to put his standing in jeopardy with the other
Broom regulars. He ran it over in his mind.
No matter what I say,
it’s going to offend someone. If I tell them what I told her, surely
they’ll think I was being patronizing too. It’s that lord of the
manor business—and it wouldn’t matter that not one of them has
ever
given thought to his daughter doing anything other than marrying
another farmer or laborer—the moment I say anything about it,
they’re going to think the worse of me
.

So
instead, he just shook his head and murmured, “Women! There’s no
pleasing them.”

The
others nodded sagely.

The
barmaid, Jessamine Heggins, glanced sideways at young Albert with compressed
lips as she passed him, collecting glasses, delivering fresh pints. Reggie
wondered if she was the one that Albert was referring to, and felt a distinct
touch of annoyance at her. That was a cruel thing, stringing the poor fellow
along!

“Well,”
he said looking into his glass, “Seems to me pretty unfair of them to
expect us to know things without being told them. Seems to me it’s pretty
unfair to expect us to figure things out from a couple of hints not even King
Solomon could guess at.”

“Aye,”
Michael grumbled, tossing back his pint.

That
was about as close as he dared come to his own grievance, and eventually
someone ventured an oblique guess as to the likelihood of rabbitting come fall.

Now
Reggie felt a bit more comfortable. “You know,” he said,
thoughtfully, and with an artfully casual manner, “My manager says that
the rabbits are multiplying something awful this year. Three years now, no
one’s been thinning them out with shooting.
I
think a few snares
wouldn’t come amiss.” He looked around the pub, as if he
didn’t know very well that every one of these men had been poaching
“his” rabbits for generations. “Any of you fellows know
someone that might be willing to put out some snares in the Longacre woods?
Proper rabbit snares now, not something to catch a pheasant by accident.”