The Last Summer (13 page)

The first time I heard them I thought it was thunder: a storm, sweeping in from the sea, over the hills. I lay in my bed listening to it, waiting for it to move in – or fade away. But it didn’t. It continued. A dull, distant rumbling, punctuated every so often by something louder, a boom. Those were the
big guns
, Papa told me.

One particularly windy morning my father arrived back from the farm in a state of excitement. He came rushing into the morning room, where I was sitting quietly with Mama – reading the newspaper.

‘You should hear it out there,’ he said, smoothing down his windswept hair. ‘From the bottom of long field woods you’d think the fighting was just beyond those hills. Remarkable,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘Quite remarkable . . .’

I raced outside and jumped into the dogcart to return there
with him, but Mama refused to come. She had no desire, she said, to hear the distant barrage of warfare, particularly not one in which her sons were fighting. We sat in the dogcart on a track at the southernmost point of the estate; and we sat in silence for ten minutes or more, listening to the intermittent juddering and booms, swept across the Channel and into our fields.

‘It seems so near . . .’

‘It is near,’ my father replied. ‘Only a narrow channel of water separates us from that fighting, Clarissa.’

And as we turned and headed home it suddenly hit me:
a narrow channel of water
. If the enemy could push forward, break through our lines, reach the coast of France . . . they could cross that channel of water. I wanted to ask my father questions; wanted to ask him the likelihood of that happening, for if anybody would know, I thought, he would. But I didn’t want him to have to think about that possibility. I didn’t want him to have to consider that. So I remained quiet. But as we headed back towards the house I couldn’t stop this train of thought. For already I could picture the German soldiers arriving at Deyning, marauding about the place, pulling it apart and laughing loudly. And what would we do? What would I do? And what if it happened at night? Of course, of course it would happen at night, was bound to happen at night – under the cover of darkness. I’d have to have a gun, I thought . . . have to be able to defend myself. And I saw myself in my room, my locked door being broken down by laughing German soldiers as I stood brandishing a pistol.

I took a deep breath. ‘Papa, I think I should have a gun,’ I said. ‘I think we should all have a gun by our beds.’

He laughed. ‘A gun? But you don’t know how to use a gun, Clarissa. And why ever do you need one?’

I didn’t want to worry him, didn’t want to have to explain to him how things
could
unfold.

‘For reasons of safety, of course,’ I said. ‘To defend myself and Deyning.’

He turned to me. ‘You’re quite safe here, my dear. And you really don’t need a gun. At least not yet.’

I didn’t notice August’s end, or September’s start. I was hungry only for news: news of the war. I read the newspaper, often from cover to cover and sometimes out loud, repeating entire paragraphs in order to try to comprehend them. As I read of battles, battalions and bombs, my world expanded and took on a different hue. I looked at fatality lists: incredulous, aghast. For how could so many be killed? They had only just gone. And though I tried to accept that my three brothers, along with Tom, were unseen players in that macabre daily news bulletin, it still seemed unreal. Life, our routines, continued at Deyning, but it was different. Everyone was already in some infinitesimal way altered by the sudden cessation of that summer.

My mother, ever resourceful and fervently patriotic, threw herself wholeheartedly into the war effort. She attended the Appeal to Women meetings at the local village hall, and returned full of plans and ideas for a working party; informing my father that we should offer up all of our young and healthy horses, and asking him if the middle meadow could be used as a rifle range. She had endless meetings with Mr Broughton to discuss how best to utilise the kitchen gardens, and even toyed with the idea of digging up the parterre in order to increase Deyning’s vegetable production. She briefed the servants on new rules concerning the running of the house, had the drawing room and ballroom shut up, and reassigned the usage of rooms in order to conserve coal. And she set about organising all of us women at home to make war garments: balaclavas, gloves, scarves and socks – anything deemed useful for
our boys
at the front.

She had George’s new gramphone relocated to the morning room and, each evening after dinner, with the air of a colonel
organising his regiment, she rounded up her
knitting party
, which included Wilson, Mabel, Edna, Mrs Cuthbert, and myself, fulfilling the role of a private, and delegated the unravelling and rewinding of balls of wool, and the sewing up of mittens. As we sat in a circle, round the fire, serenaded by the crackling strains of Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, we seemed to knit and sew in time with the music. And I wondered who’d wear these things we’d made with so much fervour. Would they hear the music?

‘I was thinking, Mama, wouldn’t it be wonderful if these mittens were to end up on George or Henry or William’s hands?’ (Or on Tom’s, I thought, glancing at Mrs C.)

‘Really, Clarissa, I do so wish you’d think less and try to be a little more industrious,’ she snapped back at me.

Her weekly trips to London had stopped, and without them she seemed to me to be unnecessarily short tempered. Could her incessant train journeys and interviews with parlourmaids and the like really be so important to her? One evening she’d burst into tears when I asked her if she’d one day take me to stay with her at the Empress Club. And I wondered then if she simply enjoyed the hurly-burly of travel and if there was not some neglected Romany spirit lurking beneath that immaculate, pale exterior.

I wrote to Tom almost every day. And cycling to the end of the lane – where the road forks and the postbox stands in the middle of a triangle of grass – I felt the thrill of subterfuge: for I was having an
illicit
affair. Yes, it was a love affair, the beginning of a Great Love Affair, and the thought of him holding my letter in his hands, casting his eyes over my words, was intoxicating, heady stuff. When the weather became inclement I coerced Broughton into posting my letters for me. After all, he knew my secret, he’d seen me; seen us. And I’d already told Tom to send his letters to me via Broughton, at his cottage. Broughton appeared quite untroubled by this arrangement and became used
to me, I’m sure, appearing at his door or by his side somewhere in the garden. He’d pull the paper from the pocket of his apron and hand it to me with a curious, knowing smile. But quite often he’d be with Mama, and usually in the greenhouse or the hothouse, bent over some tiny specimen in a terracotta pot, examining its possibilities. And then I’d swiftly turn.

I sent Tom my watercolour of the lake, though I still wasn’t at all happy with it. But it was home, I thought, something for him to remember and hold on to; and I’d painted it for him. I shall treasure it, always, he wrote to me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he knew what or where it was. But did it matter?

I told him of the magnificent white owl in the pine tree beyond my bedroom window; how I’d watched it fly off towards a huge silvery moon one night and imagined it was flying straight to him, carrying a tiny rolled-up note from me. But what would that tiny rolled-up note say? he’d asked. ‘That my heart beats only for you,’ I replied. I told him about the enormous spider recently taken up residence outside my windowpane, its shimmering fly-filled web growing day by day. I like to think of that spider, he replied; I like to imagine I’m that spider, looking back at you through your window, watching you. I told him of my solitary afternoon excursions, rowing across the lake to the island: the water murky, the air damp and filled with smoke from bonfires. I shall row you there one day . . . I shall take you there, and spend the whole day listening to your voice, studying your face, he wrote. Do you think of me? Do you think of me now? I asked, hungry for more. Always, he replied,
You’re my vision, Clarissa, my beacon of hope.

I found myself seeking out Mrs Cuthbert more and more; being with her made me feel closer to Tom, and I often had to stop myself from blurting out her son’s news, having received a more up-to-date letter than she. I sat at the table in the kitchen, chatting to her, asking her questions, gathering whatever snippets
I could: stories and anecdotes about his childhood, which I later recorded in my journal. There was never any mention of Mr Cuthbert, and I’d long since dismissed Henry’s queer remark in the dining room that day. And Tom had told me anyway, told me what he knew: that his father had died shortly before he was born, that there’d only ever been him and his mother. But he must have been a tall man, I thought, a handsome man; and quite different to Tom’s mother, who, sweet as she was, was a diminutive woman with no obvious beauty. They looked so different, and Tom had such an entirely different demeanour to that of his mother. Sometimes it was hard for me to imagine that Mrs Cuthbert had actually given birth to
my
Tom.

We were still counting the war in days then. Sunday, November the first, was the ninetieth day, and in church we all prayed once again for a swift end to the fighting. Could it end by Christmas? Would my brothers and Tom be home by then? I imagined us all singing carols under the tree in the hallway, the war already in the past, already a memory.

In one of his letters to me Tom quoted some lines from Blake, I think:
To see the world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour . . .

But I could tell by the tone, by the words he chose not to write, that he was living through something too awful to speak of. He never mentioned love, never mentioned the future, but he told me that he thought of me upon waking and when he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. I prayed for him in church, and for my brothers too. I thought of him as I walked through the grounds, had conversations with him in my head; I pictured him smiling; imagined his hand in mine, his lips touching mine; and each night I dreamt of him.

I played games with myself, handing out questions for the universe to answer: if this pebble lands beyond the jetty, he’ll
come back to me; if
that
leaf blows down from the roof, it means he’ll marry me; if the owl hoots once more it means I shall receive a letter from him in the morning post.

I had to be careful to rein in my ecstasy after receiving any letter from him. This was certainly not the time to be wandering about the place singing or whistling a jolly tune. And so I tutored myself in the art of solemnity, kept my euphoria private, and adopted a serious demeanour in keeping with everyone else and the general ambience of the house. I continued my solitary daily walks about the estate, carefully choreographing scenes and conversations yet to happen. I returned to those places of our clandestine moments together, replaying them in my head, languishing in his treasured words . . . and sometimes adding more. I stood under frosty sunsets, my warm breath mingling with the cold evening air as I watched the silent flight of birds across the sky. And even in those twilit autumnal days I felt a light shine down upon my path. For though he was no longer at Deyning, no longer in England, the fact that he lived and breathed had already altered my vision; and nothing, not even a war, could quell my faith in the inevitability of his presence in my life.

. . . I am close to our front line now, not far from Neuve Chapelle, & close enough to hear the fighting. It’s been rather warm here of late, and the roads – all cobble-stoned – are hell to march on, particularly in the heat, but the Route Nationale is as straight as a die & one can see for miles & miles across the countryside. Did I tell you, we’re not allowed to have white handkerchiefs? In case we’re tempted to raise them up into the air and wave them about like a white flag. Those who knew absolutely no French now know ‘Mouchoir rouge’! In fact, we seem to be inventing new French words by the day, Franglais. I’m compiling a list (of those suitable for your eyes) and will send them on to you soon . . . I know you’ll be amused.