The Very Thought of You (7 page)

Once she had completed her dressing-room rituals, Elizabeth would emerge into the school. Crisply dressed, with her distinctive clipped walk echoing through the Marble Hall.

Anna could recognize her footsteps at once. From a distance, half-afraid and half-intrigued, she would often watch Mrs Ashton in her silken blouse, with her skirt barely shifting as she walked. Her shoulders and long neck appeared still and poised, even though she moved briskly. Her face, too, was unflinching. She did not smile much, and always seemed to be setting off somewhere else. Probably because she didn’t teach any lessons like her husband. She was usually busy organizing everyone else – the matrons, the kitchen staff, the housemaids.

Ashton Park was more like a proper school now, with rotas and rules, and Anna always did what she could to stay out of trouble. At first she had been afraid of dormitory life, where
nothing could be secret and she had to undress in front of other children. Yet she had got used to that, as well as the thin blankets at night, and the cold days when they all took turns to sit on the old tepid radiators. But she was often hungry.

“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” muttered the cook, if she saw the children’s disappointed faces.

Yet despite these austerities, Anna now often relaxed into happiness. There were group games of hide-and-seek right round the house, and her heart raced with the elation of playing with so many children. Sometimes, when she hid in a cupboard waiting to be found, she had to bite her knuckles just to stop herself from whooping out loud.

But although Anna appeared cheerful, even to herself, she was troubled by bad dreams at night. Sometimes her mother would grow old very suddenly, all grey and withered, or her face would begin to bubble with warts, with her small, straight nose turning bulbous and ugly. Anna would run to save her, but the scene would dissolve into a chase, with a faceless, implacable man following them everywhere, through cupboards, down streets, into every dark corner.

She cherished any remembered glimpses of her mother, but too often her face was unclear – a shape, a glance, her head turning, no more. Sometimes, Anna simply could not remember what she looked like. Yet she dreaded her mother’s hair turning white in her absence.

She began to wet her bed, unleashing a cycle of fear and shame. She would wake suddenly in cold, sodden sheets, and know with a shiver of panic that the matron would be furious with her.

Miss Harrison was fiercely impatient with any bed-wetters. She would publicly scold the offending children at breakfast, making them stand up one by one, before ordering them upstairs, shame-faced, to change their sheets.

Every night, Anna prayed solemnly for a dry bed. She avoided drinking any water, and went to the lavatory as many times as she could. Yet in the dead of night she would still wake up to a slippery damp mattress, the sheets icy-wet against her legs, her heart chilled with fear.

Every third Wednesday, the children had to troop down to the laundry room in a long line, dumping their sheets in wicker baskets. One morning, Anna was the first down, and she saw the junior matron slip out the key from a crockery cabinet to unlock the door.

Two nights later, she woke up alert and afraid in a wet bed. But she remembered the key to the laundry room. Quietly, she stripped the offending sheet from her bed and used it to sop up the wet mattress. Then she rolled her sheet up into a ball and started to creep downstairs.

First down the top stairs, where every step seemed to creak. Then she decided to walk down the forbidden mahogany staircase, to avoid the long corridor past the matron’s room. Down she went, clinging to the banister so as not to slip on the polished wooden steps.

She worked her way through the dark, cold hall, which glowed with lunar light off the marble floor. Now she had to pass Mr and Mrs Ashton’s rooms, and get down the steps to the basement. She heard an owl hooting outside, and her own feet scuffing the stone floor as she reached up, at last, for the laundry-room key.

She opened the door and felt her way round the dark room, not daring to turn on a light. She found the drawers where the sheets were held, and pulled one out. She couldn’t see in the dark if it was exactly right – it seemed to be a thicker sheet. So she felt for another. That was the one she would take.

She folded up her wet sheet as neatly as she could, and stuffed it into the back of the nearest drawer. Then, with her
heart drumming, she relocked the door and crept upstairs the way she had come.

The Marble Hall was already showing the first glimmer of light as she hurried back to her dormitory. Another child stirred as she tiptoed towards her bed, but nobody woke up. She folded her blue, rough towel, and placed it over the wet patch on the mattress. Then she laid the new sheet over the top, with the bedclothes too, and fell into bed, exhausted, though not forgetting to remove her wet nightdress.

The next morning she dressed quickly and straightened out her bed. At breakfast, there was no fierce summons from Miss Harrison.

Twice more, she awoke suddenly in the night with icy wet sheets against her skin. Twice more, she ventured down to the locked laundry room successfully. But on her third trip she encountered something which she would never forget.

She was safely down the mahogany stairs, and through the Marble Hall, and was about to head down the final flight of stairs to the laundry room. Her journey took her past the great panelled door which opened onto the Ashtons’ suite of rooms. Occasionally, the children saw the door open in the daytime: they could glimpse a crimson sitting room, and a door beyond leading to the Ashtons’ bedroom.

As she left the Marble Hall behind her, she was shocked to see that the Ashtons’ door was open and their light was still on. She heard voices, and dashed to hide behind a Chinese lacquered dresser in the corridor’s corner. Cowering there, she waited with dread to hear the clack-clack of Mrs Ashton’s heels walking towards her. Blood pounded in her ears as she crouched there, still clutching the damp sheet.

No footsteps came near her, but there were sounds, and Anna strained to listen. She could hear an agitated voice – Mrs Ashton, she thought – from the next room. It must
be the middle of the night. Didn’t they know their door was open?

After a few minutes Anna crept out from her position, and moved quietly, slowly, towards the stairs. But as she did so, her eye was drawn through the open door to a large oval mirror hanging on the crimson wall. She saw something move and looked again.

It was Mrs Ashton, naked.

Sheer shock branded the sight on her mind. She caught only glimpses, as Mrs Ashton moved in and out of vision through the bedroom reflected in the mirror. But it was a searing vision of a woman’s body. Anna had never seen her mother naked, and the sight of Mrs Ashton’s mature breasts and dark bush of hair was astonishing to her. She was repelled and entranced. Is that what would happen to her own skimpy body one day? She stayed rooted to the spot, her eyes fixed to the mirror, listening.

Though she could only catch snatches of what was being said, she recognized a desperation which frightened her. Mrs Ashton was swearing and choking on foul words at her husband. Violent language she had never heard before. Guttural sounds which chilled her.

She crept away as silently as she could.

* * *

Elizabeth Ashton was drunk. She was walking up and down naked in her bedroom, swearing, sobbing, showing Thomas the menstrual blood smeared down her legs.

“I’m bleeding again,” she cried. “I’m bleeding.”

She swore at Thomas, gagging on a string of ugly expletives. It was a strangled voice, hysterical, before she doubled over with weeping, her breasts pressing against bare legs.

Another month and still no pregnancy. Thomas sat by silently on their bed, longing to soothe and pacify her, but knowing he could not reach her yet. Sometimes, when Elizabeth menstruated, her raving grief could not be contained. Drink unleashed this frenzy in her. She drained the room of any space for his emotions; he just had to wait for her to collapse onto the bed in a drunken sleep as he knew she eventually would.

Both of them were exhausted by her misery. There were times when Thomas longed to be left alone, but he felt responsible for his wife’s unhappiness. They were both damaged people now, both locked into their drama together. Some self-destructive urge made Elizabeth stay with him. She would neither leave him, nor would she adopt a child.

At last she sank onto the bed and her sobs ebbed into sleep. He covered her and switched off the bedside light. The door remained open till morning, when the kitchen maid spotted it on her way to the dining room. She shut it before the children came down to breakfast.

* * *

In the morning Anna saw Mrs Ashton stride through the Marble Hall, trim and elegant as ever, her face a mask of distant composure. Anna stole aglance at her breasts, so discreetly tidied away now behind the silky blouse. Then she felt ashamed and anxious.

Did all adults cry out in such pain behind their bedroom doors?

It was only once more that Anna wet her bed, and she allowed herself to be rebuked by the matron rather than go on her dark journey to the laundry room.

But whenever she saw Mrs Ashton now, she felt a strange bond with her. Because Anna knew she was unhappy, even if she did not know why. Mrs Ashton’s sadness was her secret now, too.

She found herself puzzling over an unfamiliar pang inside. Mr Ashton’s words came back to her, from his lesson. “Things are not always quite as they seem.” She thought of his smiling face, and his wheelchair, never mentioned. She thought of Mrs Ashton and her secret sorrow. She found herself troubled by a new twinge inside – an ache she could not quite fathom.

It was as if her heart had been suddenly tuned into a strange new wireless station for other people’s sorrows. And their vibrations would not quite let her go, even if they had nothing to do with her.

11

Soon after the evacuees’ arrival, Thomas began to dream that he could dance again. Whether the children had awakened something in him, he couldn’t say, but suddenly his dreams transported him into wide, bright rooms of flowing waltzes and swift, intricate foxtrots on sprung floors. Dreams in which he could feel himself dancing, yet watched himself too, both dancer and audience. So vivid were his sensations that he would awake with a pleasant ache in his legs, surprised to discover that he had only been dreaming.

The dreams took him by surprise, but did not sadden him: they were rejuvenating. As if the past was still inside him, within reach. Sometimes he whirled around a ballroom with Elizabeth, or he gazed into the eyes of other, earlier lovers, from the days when he was a young diplomat stepping out in Berlin.

There was one tender night in Berlin which Thomas would not forget. A ball at the French embassy, when he held Elizabeth’s waist and led her deftly round the dance floor, as if nobody else was there. When their marriage was only weeks old.

Her eyes were fixed on his, and she began to laugh, exulting in their moment together. “I am dancing with my wife,” he thought. “This is us – you and me, together.”

“Happy?” he asked her. “So happy,” she said, “so very happy.”

He could not contain his own joy as he spun her round the floor, the music flowing through them and the tenor crooning his love song.

Oh sweet and lovely lady be good,
Oh lady be good to me…

Even now, ten years on, he could still remember her eyes reaching into his own. Later events could never quite cancel out what once had been. There was still that time, whatever came afterwards.

As he sat at his study desk preparing for the day’s lessons, his thoughts wandered back further, to the summer of 1914 – and the day when his mother had taken him out from school to watch a polo match in London. He could remember standing with his sister Claudia amidst the
Hurlingham Club’s ornamental gardens, waiting to see their brother William, whose cavalry regiment had just returned from India. It was a day of great excitement for them all; they had not seen William in over two years.

He appeared with a familiar wave, taller, darker-haired, more dashing than Thomas ever remembered. He had grown a lustrous moustache, and his powerful legs filled his riding boots.

“Our team is being drilled for a summer of tournament wins,” he explained casually.

That was a great afternoon for the Twelfth Lancers. They played with grace and speed and intuition. For a moment, when William fell and their mother Miriam rose with a cry, it looked as though the afternoon might be blighted. But William was unhurt, and his team played on to win the Subaltern’s Cup with ease.

Afterwards, a sea of coloured hats fooded the lawns as the spectators congregated for tea and sandwiches. Claudia danced about, euphoric to see her eldest brother, and entranced by the braid and brass buttons of the cavalry uniforms. Here was the full pageantry of the Empire, with its glinting array of young men. Claudia pulled Thomas along to watch the military band down by the lake. As the crowds died away, the bandsmen paraded with a final slow march, their spurs glimmering in the late-afternoon sunshine. Thomas noted the strange slow double-step performed with solemn grace even by the stoutest bandsmen.

Everyone knew that war was in the air, and the proud valedictory note of the brass band caught at the hearts of many mothers. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was everywhere discussed.

“If war happens, it will be over by Christmas,” was the line which Thomas heard passed around
Hurlingham that day.

Be thou my guardian and my guide,
And hear me when I call;
Let not my slippery footsteps slide,
And hold me lest I fall…

Even after war was declared, school went on as usual for Thomas. Beneath the soaring fan vaulting of Eton College
Chapel, he continued to sing rousing Anglican hymns. Glancing upwards, the chapel’s carved medieval stone made any present troubles seem somehow insignificant.

We blossom and fourish as leaves on a tree –
And wither, and perish, but naught changeth thee…