The Passing Bells (50 page)

The bells of University College chapel pealed the first stroke of nine.

“I must go,” Ivy said. “Perhaps we can talk again tomorrow.”

Alexandra bent quickly forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I'll be joining up tomorrow. Good night . . .
Sister
Thaxton.”

“Well, I never,” Ivy murmured, holding one hand to her cheek. She stood in the corridor and watched Alexandra cross the vast entrance hall, crowded now with departing visitors. The frescoes on the hall's walls depicted famous healers, and, stretched above the door, a twenty-foot sign lettered by the ambulatory patients said,
PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN
.

God rest ye merry, gentlemen:

Let nothing you dismay.

Remember Christ, our Savior,

Was born on Christmas Day.

“The carolers are not quite what they used to be,” Lady Margaret Wood-Lacy whispered. “Jim Penny, Will Adams . . . oh, all the best baritones are in the army.”

They sounded harmonic enough to Fenton. He invited them in for hot whiskies or punch, but they gracefully declined and moved off down the lane toward the Shaw house, where Mr. and Mrs. Shaw and their five children waited expectantly.

It came upon a midnight clear,

That glorious song of old. . . .

Fenton closed the front door and followed his mother down the hall and into the parlor. An aroma of roasting goose filled the house.

“I'd better see how Jinny is coming along,” Lady Margaret said. “She gets forgetful sometimes.”

Jinny was eighty years old and the only servant Sir Harold and Lady Margaret had ever had, or needed, having lived most of their married life in cottages at the various job sites—Balmoral, Sandringham, Abingdon Pryory. But the small exquisitely constructed house in Suffolk—an architect's house, after all—had always been waiting for them, with Jinny puttering about in the kitchen.

Fenton poured a whiskey and stood by the bay window. The last glow of the pale winter sun glinted off the cold wind-stirred waters of the River Deben. Home for Christmas, but his thoughts were far from carol singers, holly, and roast goose. It was the second Christmas of the war and far different from the first one. He had celebrated that Christmas in France, quartered in a château near Béthune. All conversation in the mess had been of peace, perhaps not on earth, but surely in France. They had all believed that the war would be over within a month. Astonishing reports had come to them of British and German troops meeting in no-man's-land to exchange gifts and to sing carols.

“It means the end, you know,” Captain Jarvis had remarked sagely. “Our lads have lost the fighting spirit and the Enemy is as exhausted as we are. It's up to their politicians to work out something with our striped-pants brigade. There'll be a general cease-fire within a week. You mark my words.”

He had buried Captain Jarvis three months later at Neuve-Chapelle with one hundred sixty of his men.

One year.

Not just men had died. War destroyed more than human life. It nibbled away at the spirit, corroded the senses, mocked all the old values. It was what the French liaison officer at Laventie, in the wisdom of a Cognac haze, had called
le cafard.
It was empty stables and unpruned trees at Abingdon. It was a thousand men in sodden khaki, who could have been better employed, stumbling across a railway track with rifles in their hands. It was Lydia Greville naked by a fire.

He looked in on Roger's old room before going to bed. It was exactly as Roger would have expected it to be, had he suddenly come bursting into the house. The bed made. A notebook and pencil on the nightstand. His books, well dusted, on the shelves.

“It's not a shrine,” his mother said quietly, seeing him standing there in the hall. “And I have no illusions about him being a prisoner of the Turks. It's just that I hated to put away all the things that he had loved. He wouldn't have wanted his Wordsworth and Shelley sealed in a box.”

There would be unfinished poems in the notebook, Fenton knew. Lines for an unfinished life.

Le cafard.

His mother was on a dozen committees of one kind or another in Woodbridge, and certainly did not lack for friends. She enjoyed being with her son, but did not need him for comfort.

“You seem restless, Fenton,” she remarked on the Thursday before New Year's Eve. “Thinking about your new job?”

“And other things.”

He took the train that afternoon, a slow train crowded with sailors from Harwich going to London on leave. It was dark when the train pulled into King's Cross. He shared a taxi with five naval officers who insisted on buying him a drink at the Army-Navy Club. Conversation in the bar ranged from the merits of oil-fired ships vis-à-vis coal to the bedroom antics of French women. He had one drink, excused himself, and left.

It was a familiar route that he walked—along the Mall, past Buckingham Palace, and into Lower Belgrave Street. He strode past his old flat without glancing at it and continued on to Sloane Street and across Pavillion Road into Cadogan Square. Number 24.

If the butler was surprised at the lateness of the call, he did not show it by so much as a blink of the eye.

“Miss Winifred, sir? I do believe she has retired for the night.”

“Who the devil's at the door, Peterson?” A testy voice sounded from down the corridor, and then Lord Sutton emerged from the gloom in maroon smoking jacket and carpet slippers.

“Fenton, by gad! What the devil you doin' here at this hour?”

“I was . . . in the neighborhood,” he said lamely. “Sorry if I woke up the household.”

“Nonsense.” The marquess dismissed the butler with a gesture. “It's good to have company. Close the door before you freeze us out.”

“I didn't realize it was so late.”

“It isn't. We retire early . . . except for me. Just goin' to have a nightcap or two.”

A slender shaft of light fell on the dark stairwell from the upper floors, the light widening with the full opening of a door. Fenton looked up at the figure standing by the second-floor balustrade.

“Hello,” he said.

“We still have a telephone,” Winifred said.

“I'm sorry. . . . I intended to call . . . but . . . one thing and another came up . . . and then I went to Suffolk for Christmas—”

“There's nothing to explain, Fenton.”

“I think that there is.”

Lord Sutton scowled at Fenton and then glared up at his daughter.

“Either come down or go back to bed, Winnie. As for me, I'm goin' to the library and closin' the door.”

“Well?” Fenton asked after the marquess had done just that.

She came down the stairs clad in a long, quilted-satin dressing gown, her hair loose about her shoulders. She did not descend to the foyer, but sat on the third step from the bottom.

“What an odd man you are, Fenton.”

“Impulsive . . . also a bit reflective.” He leaned against the banister post below her, hands shoved into the pockets of his trench coat. “I've been doing a lot of thinking the past few days. You said that we're different people now. I know I'm not the same, but I can't say that about you. You're older and wiser, but essentially the same. I don't think anything will ever change you radically, Winnie.”

“Everyone changes.”

“I suppose they do. It's a matter of degree, isn't it? Some people tarnish more quickly than others. You will always have a polish . . . a certain luster.”

She folded her arms about her knees. “You came to propose, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“That'll make Father very happy.”

“It's not your father I care about pleasing.”

“It'll make me happy, too. I love you, Fenton. I fell in love with you when I was sixteen and Andrew brought you down to Lulworth for my birthday party. Or was it your scarlet jacket I fell in love with then? Difficult to say. I don't love you for your jacket now. In fact, I love you in spite of it. I hate this war. If you marry me, you'll be in the odd position of having a pacifist for a wife.”

“General Davenport's wife is a suffragette. She chained herself to a letter box once. It didn't ruin his career.”

“I pray for the day when
your
career is unnecessary.”

“So do I.”

She looked at him in silence for a moment and then hugged her knees tighter to her body.

“One thing has been left unsaid. Father will be happy . . . I'll be happy. What of yourself? Do you love me?”

“If wanting to be with you is loving you . . . if feeling at peace is loving . . . then, yes . . . I love you.”

She nodded somberly. “How blunt and honest you are. Shall we go in and tell Father?”

“I would like that, yes.”

“Shall we be married in London? Or would you prefer Suffolk?”

He rubbed the side of his jaw. “The fact is, I have only five days' leave left. I thought we could . . . well, go up to Scotland tomorrow and get married in Gretna . . . stand in line with the other couples. That is, if you don't mind.”

“Oh, Lord.” She laughed. “Gretna Green! What will Mother say?”

“She won't have a chance to say anything.” Lord Sutton stepped into the foyer, a bottle of champagne under each arm. “Knew how the wind was blowin' when you knocked on the door, Fenton. Put the bottles in your kit bag. Mumm's nineteen ten. The Royal Mail leaves Euston Station at midnight. You have plenty of time to make it if you can hurry your packin', Winnie.”

She stood up slowly. “We can miss the train, Fenton, if you have any doubts at all . . . any second thoughts.”

“Why would he have doubts?” her father blustered. “I'll ring 'round for the car.”

“I mean it,” she said.

He reached up and touched her hand, his eyes steady on her face. “No second thoughts, Winnie.”

She turned quickly and hurried up the stairs.

The marquess gazed after her, then handed the bottles of champagne to Fenton.

“I'd crack one of these with you, but there ain't time for it. I'm glad to see her leave this house, Fenton, and I think you know why. She's a good girl. Clever. Strong in body and mind. And she's a Sutton . . . she'll bear sons.”

The wind came in a flood off the Irish Sea to churn the waters of Luce Bay and rattle the windows of the inn. Putting one hand on the glass, Fenton could feel the chill power of it. The wind had chased the mist, and the hills of Cumberland were like banks of green cloud across the Solway Firth. He drew his robe tighter around him and then lit a cigarette, the draft through the windows spiraling the smoke behind him.

“What are you thinking?” she asked after a time.

“Oh, one thing and another. It's New Year's Day, and a bright, cold day it is, too.”

“A good beginning.”

“Yes. To see the sun in Wigtownshire on the first of January is cause for celebration.”

“You've been here before, haven't you?”

“Port William, you mean?”

“This inn.”

“Oh, yes, several times. A friend of mine kept a boat at Stranraer and we used to sail these waters—Islay, Mull, the Hebrides—and up and down the Solway, of course. Tricky seas and bloody dangerous at times.”

“Ever bed a girl here?”

He puffed on the cigarette. “What a question. Downright Elizabethan phrasing. The answer is no. I never bedded a girl—
here
.”

“I do love you, Fenton. I think you're quite incapable of lying. Even your white ones have the ring of truth.”

His feet were numb with cold. He ground the cigarette out in a saucer and got back into bed. Winifred opened his robe and pressed the warmth of her body against him.

“I'm not a disappointment, am I?”

“You're an astonishing revelation,” he said.

“It's being a country girl,” she said, stroking his hip. “I know all the natural acts.”

He turned onto his side and kissed her forehead. “And a few naughty ones, too. A sweet doxy.”

“Who's being Elizabethan now?” Her arms enfolded him. “May I ask you something that you don't have to answer?”

“Yes.”

“Was there someone you would rather have brought here than me? Someone you couldn't have?”

“That was an age ago,” he said quietly.

“Do you find yourself comparing us?”

“There's nothing to compare. You are . . . Winifred. Uniquely yourself.”

“The colonel's lady.”

“Yes. A lady to your fingertips.”

Her hands glided up and down his back. “Not all the time.”

He did not think of Lydia, nor had he while making love to her during the night. The act was beyond the objective comparing of one woman to another, one body to another. It was even beyond the seeking of pleasure. It was life that he sought in her, and creation. The war kept its hold on him even in bed. His thrusts into her warm living body—her gasps and cries—became the antithesis of death and pain to him. He sensed her understanding of that, her awareness of his need, and it set her uniquely apart from any other woman he had known. The wind, tugging at the windows, rattling them in their frames, howled and shrieked under the eaves, reminding him of the demented sound of shells. He pressed his face into the soft hollow between her breasts as she clasped him tightly, as if to shield him on this first day of the year from all the days to follow.

16

Charles left the War Office and walked briskly along Whitehall to Charing Cross. It was an almost too perfect April day, the type of day that would inspire a poet to rapture. The wind out of the west was gentle and carried with it a heady perfume of spring rain. Soft, impeccably white clouds drifted across a flag-blue sky, and a shaft of sun, as though arranged by the Almighty, fell directly on Admiral Nelson standing on his column. At the base of the monument, clustered like gray pigeons, old women were selling violets by the bunch.