The Gates of Rutherford (35 page)

“
I meant impressed. Charmed. I'm sure that it was . . .” He could see that she was on the verge of saying “nothing more,” but she didn't. She hesitated, perplexed.

“And you told me that Christine had gone to Charlotte's room after the wedding ceremony.”

“But it can't be. It's a friendship. Nothing more than that. Surely . . .”

“Radiantly happy, darling. You said so yourself. Happier than her wedding day.”

“But to accept Michael's marriage proposal, if she felt that way!”

“Well, I don't know the answer there,” he admitted. “But perhaps
it was a last attempt to try to feel what society would call normal. To go through the motions, to
make
herself as others. But against her nature. Against her true feelings.”

He watched as her mouth dropped open in surprise. She was not very deeply shocked, he could see: nor morally outraged, or even disapproving. None of the things that other people might be; none of the things that the previous generation might have been. Octavia was not a woman like that, he knew. She was not narrow-minded or self-righteous or demanding. But this was nevertheless outside her remit, her experience.

He got up, and pulled her gently to her feet, and embraced her. “Darling,” he said, kissing her cheek, inhaling the wonderful scent of her hair, and closing his eyes against all the images of the last few weeks that threatened to invade his mind. “There are so many worse things in the world than falling in love with the wrong person. We should know that more than anyone else.”

•   •   •

T
he day ended quietly.

They ate a dinner at home, much preferring their own company to the noise of the city. After dinner they walked in the garden, and sat beside each other as the evening drew slowly on. For some time they said nothing at all, as the shadows lengthened and all around them the trees became dark outlines through which the first stars began to show.

At last, Octavia laid her head on John's shoulder. “What's the subject of your article for the newspaper this week?” she asked.

“My God,” he murmured. “There are so many. There's so much I hesitate to write about for fear of hurting the families here.”

“What, then? Something personal to yourself?”

“I was thinking a great deal about memorials, graves. How that
would be organized. When it's over. Tracing the dead is actually a logistical nightmare. Many have simply disappeared.”

“A memorial to the missing, then?”

“That would be appropriate, yes. Then—and this would strike a chord with Jack Armitage, I'm sure—there's the horses. The rations are low. I've seen horses that are plainly starving. One feels impotent, furious about it . . .”

Octavia suddenly sat up, and clapped her hand to her forehead. “Oh, but I forgot to tell you!”

“What?”

“Louisa phoned me to tell me that Jack is coming home. His father is very distressed because Jack has some sort of battle fatigue. Louisa spoke to William today. They're trying to contact the padre again who wrote the letter to Josiah. Apparently he said that Jack had been working with transporting the wounded, and he suffered some sort of breakdown. . . .”

“I'm very sorry to hear that. Jack is a good man.”

“Yes, but darling. He couldn't be parted from the horses he was working with. He simply wouldn't leave them. There is your story. A man's loyalty to the horses, and how we should support them.” She was gripping his arm. “I have rather a lot more to tell you about Louisa, but it'll wait until tomorrow. But I was thinking after her call . . . couldn't we raise money, start some sort of fund? For rations for the warhorses. When Jack comes home, perhaps he would like to be part of that.”

John raised her hand to his lips, and smiled. “Shall you walk down Piccadilly, banging a drum and holding a collection plate?”

“Yes, of course. Some of those million horses were ours, you know. Rutherford's.”

“I can see you now. You will be very charming.”

“I don't want to be charming, John. I want to do something.”

He stood up, stretched, and helped her to her feet. They walked up the path and reached the house, and stopped for a moment to look at the lights inside: the soft colors, the shine of the silver, the rich colors of the paintings, the bright reds and pinks of the roses in their vase by the fireplace.

“Where was the letter from?” John asked. “The padre's letter?”

“I don't think Louisa told me.”

“And what about the horses, the ones that he wouldn't be parted from?”

“Some sort of heavy horses. The ones too broken down to be used on the artillery guns anymore.”

“Perhaps one might be brought back. To use in the campaign. I wonder if it could be done.”

“It would be wonderful,” Octavia mused. And then, in little more than a whisper, “I keep thinking of Jack refusing to leave them.”

“How sad,” John observed.

“Yes, it is sad,” Octavia agreed, slowly opening the door to the house. “But how like Jack.”

I
t was a glorious day.

The motorcycle was tearing up the track, and it registered every bump of earth, every stone in their way; the vibration felt like the very devil to Harry, like the repeated prodding of a sharp blade in his right leg. But he didn't much care. The ride was a free one and the courier a wild character, roaring and cursing in a broad Glaswegian accent. He had given Harry a lift, an against-all-regulations lift, and for that Harry was grateful. They sang an RFC mess song at the tops of their voices. “
So stand your glasses steady, this world is a web of lies, here's to the dead already, and hurrah for the next man who dies.”

The Glaswegian liked that. Harry put an arm around him when the leg got worse, and the courier grunted in complaint. “It's this or falling off,” Harry had yelled in his ear.

“Fall off, then. You're a dead weight, sir,” had come the reply.

They saw the coast before the airfield. A beautiful steel grey and blue line glimpsed over the flatness of the land; a haze out over the Channel. Harry knew that kind of sky. A man could take off in
perfect sun and rise above the haze, and there could be a brown layer above that instead of the expected blue. He'd often wondered if it was the miasma from the millions of exploded shells. Somebody in the last station had talked darkly of a host of dark souls watching the world below. Been cuffed, of course for his bloody talk. Dark souls, indeed. Absolute tosser.

Although, in dreams . . . He'd dreamed a lot since leaving John Gould. Anxious that he had told a lie, when everyone was expecting his return, images came to him while asleep of empty railway stations, empty tracks. A sense of being uninhabited. And then he had seen that the image was always of the railway station nearest Rutherford. The track unused, with grass growing up between the sleepers. Weeds between the paving slabs on the platform. Moss hanging from the ticket barrier and the roof. Nature reclaiming the whole scene, obliterating even the road beyond. And he would wake in a sweat, wondering why he could imagine such a thing.

The track now became, quite suddenly, a decent but narrow road running right alongside the sea. Now and again a little shingle beach would appear, a rim of stones merely between the water and the flat, still-waterlogged fields beyond. Stunted poplars and willows passed them; trees that had been shaped almost to horizontal lines by the prevailing winds.
Good flying country
, Harry thought to himself.

Harry closed his eyes, inhaling the salt on the wind, and hearing the rumble of waves on the shingle. He thought of the Matthew Arnold poem had been taught at school. Something about a beach. Something about shingles, and the sound that it made as the waves came in. Was it Dover beach? He'd always thought of that being perplexing, because he had never seen a beach at Dover. He supposed that there must be one, of course. A beach like the ones in Sussex, deeply shelving shingle running down to the water. Like the one in Pevensey, where William the Conqueror was supposed to have come
ashore.
On the French coast the light gleams and is gone, the cliffs of England stand. . . .

He was suddenly struck with a piercing homesickness.
The cliffs of England stand
. . . . He ought to have gone home as commanded. As ordered. They seemed to have lost track of him now; perhaps when he arrived at Nieuwpoort they would have caught up with him. Perhaps he would walk into this air station and the commanding officer would say, “Cavendish?
Cavendish?
You bastard, you're not meant to be here. Get the fuck away with you. Go home. Quite plainly says here to go home. . . .”

But men did all kinds of strange and ungovernable things. Take the man Churchill, for instance. Yesterday Harry had seen a newspaper—the first in many days—and there had been an article about the previous First Lord of the Admiralty. Booted out of his government post, Churchill had been made lieutenant-colonel of the sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers. But it hadn't been for long: he was back in Parliament now, spouting off all the usual blarney. He'd got permission to go back to London because he'd said that his public duties had become urgent. Harry thought that was very funny, and the courier shared his opinion when Harry told him. “I read something about Churchill . . .” he had begun, when they had stopped to get water for the steaming, smoke-wreathed motorcycle. “Och aye, the Butcher of Gallipoli,” had been the reply. “There's a real lot of urgent duties in a tart's knickers.”

Harry couldn't help laughing. “He didn't go back for that. He's a good chap.”

“That right?” the courier snarled. “He can come back and have some urgent business here, then. The Royal Scots lost half their battalion at Plug Street.”

“He flies aircraft,” Harry murmured.

“Aye, does he, now?”

“He used to take kites back to England for his leave. So this article said. Said the ships took too long.”

“And he'd be a bloody lot safer up there,” the courier said. “Only my opinion, mind. Only my opinion.”

The words in the newspaper article had struck something in Harry's mind, and once the thought had arrived, he couldn't shake it loose. Churchill had taken a plane to go back to England. A needed plane. If he, Harry, went to Nieuwpoort against orders, then he might as well compound his misbehavior. He might as well fly back to Blighty.

Maybe he'd take a kite that was under maintenance. Nothing much wrong with an aircraft that was being trimmed; usually just a few bullet holes. If it started, if it was intact, he could take it from the maintenance engineers. Take it up. Then find a hapless Fritz, and knock up his number of hits while he was at it. Harry had nineteen kills to his name. He'd always thought that was an ugly, uneven number. He'd make it twenty as a kind of farewell. Then, and only then, would he take the plane home. After all, if it was good enough for Churchill . . .

It was just before nine when they reached the temporary airstrip.

It looked like a poor campsite, tents billowing in the wind where pegs had shaken loose. It was like washing day, sheets cracking in the sharp wind. Men were running round trying to repair them; Harry could smell breakfast being cooked. Dew was thick on the grass, and the kites were lined up in three long rows, like girls waiting to be asked to dance. Harry got off the motorcycle, thanked the courier, apologized for being a burden. The courier had grinned at him. “Can't really tell an officer to go to hell,” he had said, and shaken Harry's hand.

Harry had watched him running towards the nearest building: a farm had been here once, and part of the farmhouse remained. To
one side, a wall had been exposed, and it was painted bright yellow. His mother's sitting room in London was that color. It was the same color as the drawing room in Grosvenor Square. He liked his mother's eye; so much more cheerful than the dour preferences of his father. He always thought of William in tones of earth: brown, dark green. His mother was more like him. Bright blue. Summer colors. Yellow and pink. Apricot and rose. The cheerfulness of the memory made him smile. He would salvage something out of this mess, he thought. He would make a pretty little home with Caitlin somewhere. Perhaps he would actually go to Texas. Everything would be better there. Quiet and less complicated.

He saw himself by another ocean, another stretch of beach. They said that the beaches were fantastic in California. He would like to see them. He would like to see that whole coast. Swim in the warm water, perhaps. That would do a power of good to his aching legs. San Francisco was being rebuilt now: that was an optimistic city. He could breathe fresh air there. None of the grinding and oppressive business of aristocracy, the crushing sense of responsibility.

He would take a few years out of it all, he decided. Out of the old country and into the new. John Gould would advise him of what was best to do. How to be an American. He stood in the sunshine and laughed to himself. He could be a boy for a while, he considered. He'd never had much of a chance; just those wild days in London after Emily's death, when he had been consumed by guilt of his treatment of her.

No. He would start again. That was what war and peace was all about, surely. One fought for a fresh start, a different perspective. One fought to do away with all that was old and outdated. He could do that; forge something better, take up challenges. In time, he could bring them back to Rutherford. Churchill's example, if it showed him anything, was that one mustn't be bound in by rules that others
wrote down for you. It was possible to rewrite one's own history, surely. Start afresh. Fly.

Watching almost absentmindedly, he saw the courier come out of the farmhouse and gesture towards him. The RFC officer alongside put his hands on his hips. He made a kind of pantomime exaggeration of shaking his head. Then he lifted his arm, and beckoned Harry.

On the way, the courier passed him.

“You're not going straight back?” Harry asked.

“I am,” the man replied. “But at least I'm not in your shoes, sir. Good bloody luck.”

The squadron leader was very young; perhaps younger than himself. It was hard to tell these days. He was, at least, extremely tidy and clean, unlike Harry. This was made quite explicit as the officer's eyes ranged up and down Harry's disheveled figure. “You had better come with me,” he said at last.

They walked through the house and into a sitting room that might have been in Sussex. An overstuffed sofa; a Victorian glass case with taxidermy inside. Hummingbirds. Harry stared at it in wonder. That it had survived; that it was the most vivid and most poignant picture. Forty or fifty hummingbirds sealed forever against a watercolor sky, their wings outstretched. And alongside the domed glass, a round farmhouse table with a cloth. A white cloth. Harry looked further around the room. Curtains. A windup phonograph. A bookcase. A pile of magazines. A framed photograph of a handsome man and two small sons, and their mother looking modest in a Breton headdress. He wondered where she was now; where they all were. They might have merely stepped outside.

“Sit down,” the officer said.

Harry did so, in the nearest armchair. Such unaccustomed luxury made him feel immediately sleepy.

“You must be very pleased with yourself.”

“Pleased?” Harry replied laconically. “Not at all.”

“I had a call yesterday to say that I might expect you.”

This was a genuine surprise. “Oh really?”

“Last station you passed through.”

“Ah.”

Well, yes. He had told the captain there that he didn't want an escort through what was a very hot area,
minenwerfers
pounding away a few miles to the east. Harry lowered his eyes to the carpet.

“Acting very much like desertion, rattling around the country with no rhyme or reason.”

That made Harry sit up. “You will retract that,” he retorted. “I cannot be deserting a post from which I've been relieved. I might be deserting a hospital ship, but I doubt they'll take a head count. It's not a holiday cruise. They don't have a passenger list.”

“That's what you're relying on, I suppose.”

“I'm not relying on anything.”

“God in heaven, Cavendish, what do you think this is?” the officer suddenly demanded, red in the face. “You treat it
exactly
as one would a holiday! You are ordered to go back to England and instead you jaunt around the countryside. Why the devil have you come here?”

“I heard of the operation.”

“And you thought you might come along and gawp at it.”

“I came to observe.”

“You've no bloody business observing anything. Nobody asked for you.”

Harry stared at his feet for a while. Then, very slowly, he leaned forward. “I daresay I am a thorn in the side of the Flying Corps,” he said, enunciating each word precisely. “But I have not commandeered any transport to arrive here. I am on my way to port, via a strange
diversion, I grant you. If my advice is not needed, I shall go on my merry way.”