A Winter's Child (14 page)

‘You'll be wasting your time, Claire. He's no good,' said Nola, stalking past him with an irritable, predatory step, swinging her furs.

‘I don't get many complaints,' he breathed after her, smiling once again with his malicious sweetness as she came to a halt at the door of Kit Hardie's flat to which he now had the key.

‘Open it,' she told him curtly, making her voice a snap of the fingers.

‘Madam!'

‘How very nice,' said Claire, walking into the room without looking at it, simply to get away from them, and then realizing, when her eyes began to focus, that far from the shabbiness she had expected, the room was clean, cool, well-proportioned, scented not with damp and age but with lavender and faint, by no means unpleasant, traces of tobacco. The furniture was plain, cheap she supposed, although she was not well acquainted with the cost of furnishings, but the two armchairs and the sofa stood firmly on their carved oak feet and, although of different shapes and styles, looked well matched in their covers of green and white chintz patterned with water lilies. There were bookshelves, a table and sideboard, a fireplace with a broad mantelshelf, all of them empty but immaculate, bearing no stain, no trace of dust.

‘A tidy man, the Major,' said Euan Ash, lighting a cigarette and tossing the match, still lit, into the empty hearth.

‘Thank you,' said Nola taking out her own cigarette case. ‘Claire?'

But she shook her head, having noticed the french window and the long, walled garden beyond it, two shallow stone steps leading to a tangled fairyland of wild and cultivated foliage mixed altogether, shades of green from sage to laurel and on to emerald, pierced every now and then by the startling yellow of a daffodil, a branch of forsythia hazarding its starry, lemon blossoms between polished rhododendrons, swelling with buds. A fine, mild rain was falling, a fragile mist curling gracefully, gently around the topmost branches of a double row of trees, apple, she thought, and flowering plum, so old and so untended that their branches had interwoven into what would be a lattice-work of blossom.

No one was there. Beyond the mossy grey stone wall nothing could be seen but a low grey sky and the reassuring vastness of a giant elm whose summer foliage would provide an even denser solitude. She could be alone in this garden. In this house, with its drifting population, she could be anonymous. It was an approach to freedom, the nearest, perhaps, that she could hope to make at present, since the familiar web of her mother's insecurities had already reached out and entangled her far more than she had intended. Dorothy Lyall did not know that she needed her daughter. But Claire knew it. And until the need had lessened or settled, she understood that she could not leave Faxby.

‘You'd better take it,' said Nola from the armchair behind her. ‘You'll find nothing else at present. Nobody has been building houses during the war and now people are setting up home in barns and wooden huts and old railway carriages. So, unless you're quick about it, you'll find yourself stranded at Upper Heaton or High Meadows.'

‘And you ought to know,' said Euan Ash, turning upon Nola a light blue gaze that was far too innocent, ‘that Nola
always
knows best.'

‘Didn't he tell you to put the kettle on?' she snapped. And laughing, he held out a hand to Claire, his touch surprising her by its coolness and the dry, slightly rough texture of his skin.

‘Come on, Claire. You'd better see the kitchen
now,
more or less as Kit left it. I just hope you can match his standards. We're supposed to share it, although I don't cook anything beyond sausages and beans. I might scrounge though, should you be kind-hearted.'

The kitchen, at the end of a narrow, bottle-green passage, was square and plain and spotless, a well scoured wooden table placed directly in the centre of the dark red linoleum floor, open shelves – mainly empty – lining the walls, a shallow stone sink beneath the clean, chintz-curtained window, a surprisingly adequate gas stove offering the welcome alternative, in Claire's eyes, to the huge black iron range with its boiler and coal ovens which dominated the entire inner wall.

‘Do you understand that thing?' he enquired and sitting down at the table while he filled the kettle and turned on the gas, she smiled. She had never boiled an egg, never sliced a loaf of bread, certainly never lit a fire before 1914. And now, although eggs and bread and coal were well within her capabilities, she wondered how much time she was really willing to accord them.

‘I expect I could manage.'

‘Ah well – I'm not sure that's good enough. Kit is an absolute wizard with such things. Seems a pity to lower the standard.'

‘I suppose he cleaned everything up here too?'

Grinning, he abandoned the spluttering gas jet, left the kettle to its own devices, and came to sit beside her.

‘Who else? The place was a pigsty when he got here, although
I
never noticed it until he pointed it out to me. I moved in a week or two before him, you see – on my way to somewhere else – and since I wasn't staying, there seemed no point in changing anything. But Kit doesn't see things that way. He had the mice standing to attention before we knew where we were. I bet nobody ever got “trench foot” in his Company. He'd make sure they all took their wet boots off and kept their feet warm with sandbags. He'd be the kind of officer who shaved, too, every night and morning – no matter what.'

‘And you didn't.'

‘Christ, no. I had a beard to my knees. Good camouflage.'

‘When did you enlist?'

‘My dear child – in August, 1914. Didn't everybody?'

‘Straight from Oxford?'

‘I rather think it was Cambridge.'

‘Where did they send you?'

‘Oh, here and there. It slips my mind.'

Like Paul – like Jeremy – he would have been among those first zealous three million volunteers who, since the Government had only anticipated five hundred thousand and had nowhere near enough equipment to go round, had prepared for battle by drilling with walking-sticks. And perhaps he would have missed the first confused weeks of war when two great armies had hurried here and there around Western Europe looking for one another, led by generals who understood war in terms of cavalry charges, sweeping manoeuvres across open plains in broad daylight – preferably in good weather – and whose strategy in the main was purely and simply to keep moving. Occasionally the armies had met, taking it in turns, almost, to advance and retreat until, one late September day, the Germans who had been marching up and down, down and up, for weary weeks like everybody else, had paused for breath, dug themselves holes to shelter in, rigged up a barrier of barbed wire, a few machine-guns, and stayed there, quite simply too tired to walk any more.

Jeremy had still been in training – with his walking-stick – somewhere on Salisbury Plain, Paul already on his way to France where the allied commanders, casting puzzled looks at these trenches had realized that, since men so dug in could not easily be coaxed out again, the best thing to do would be to dig trenches of their own. And for the next four years both sides proceeded to slog out the war knee-deep in mud, throwing bombs and shells at each other, discharging poison gas which, should the wind be in the wrong direction, blew back, as often as not, and killed its own keepers; rushing at each other, from time to time, over the top of their fortifications with fixed bayonets, doing bloody, repetitive, day-in, day-out murder for the sake of a yard or two of barren ground.

Had Euan Ash been anywhere in the region of Neuve Chapelle the following March when Jeremy – as Claire knew but Miriam did not – had been impaled by a rifle bullet on the enemy wire and had hung there, horribly crucified, until a sympathetic sniper had finished him off?

‘The name seems to ring a bell,' he said, his eyes full of their deceptive, light-blue innocence.

Had he been on the Somme where, in one single day of fighting – the memorable 1st July, 1916 – the British Army lost sixty thousand men, which did not deter them from continuing their attack until, at the cost of four hundred and twenty thousand wounded or killed, they had advanced, in three months, little more than three miles?

‘Now do I look the kind of man who'd get involved in a cock-up like that?' he answered.

‘Were you at Passchendaele?'

‘Wasn't everybody?'

It had been a wet summer that year in Flanders, so that the campaign had begun on waterlogged ground into which, when it had been reduced to liquid mud by the traditional exchange of shells, men sank waist deep – in which wounded men drowned – and heavy artillery disappeared out of sight. Yet, nevertheless, notwithstanding the mustard gas used here for the first time, two sets of innocent victims stood firm and massacred one another, six hundred thousand of them bleeding into that unspeakable mud for an allied gain of five miles and the empty, abandoned village of Passchendaele which – being of no particular use to anyone – they soon gave back to the Germans again.

Had he been near Amiens the following September when, very early one morning, a British shell, falling short into No-Man's-Land had ripped Paul's legs apart and left him to lie there bleeding in its crater, until nightfall, the traditional gathering up of the day's wounded and dead, when it had been too late?

‘I seem to remember that it rained a lot,' said Euan Ash. ‘I had the devil of a job getting my boots off, once, after five days up to the ankles in trench water.'

‘What else did you do?'

‘Oh – not much. Took care not to show any more gallantry in the field than I strictly had to. Not like Kit Hardie. Now there's a man who had a good war, there's no denying.'

‘Don't you like him?'

The light eyes became a shade more angelic, the smile sweeter.

‘Now then, Claire – what a question! Even on a half-hour acquaintance you must know that he's an absolutely splendid fellow. I haven't managed so far to find a single thing he
can't
do – and by God I've tried. Our butler at home never seemed to get beyond answering the door and pinching the claret. And he wasn't even awfully good at that.'

‘Where's home, Euan?'

His smile, which seemed initially to be dazzling, was no more than a device to screen his face, a flash of brilliance used deliberately to obscure her vision so that she could not see beyond.

‘A fair distance – quite a tidy step. I'm
en route
for Edinburgh to see a friend. Did I tell you?'

‘Nola mentioned it. I can't help noticing that she doesn't seem fond of you.'

He laughed dryly, his face, without its wonderful wicked smile, looking strained for a moment and – very briefly – much older.

‘I dare say that just goes to prove her good taste.'

‘I assume there
is
a reason?'

‘Oh yes – one or two. She may tell you herself one day when she's had her absinthe or her whiff of chloroform or whatever she's using now. But
I
can't say much, can I, because a gentleman's not supposed to talk about these things. I may be the Major's odd-job man, after all, but let's not forget that I was born and raised a gentleman.'

‘And the Major wasn't? Is that what you mean?'

‘I try not to. Perhaps he's one of nature's gentlemen. Certainly he'll be a great success. I don't expect to be. But you'd be wrong to pity me – if you were thinking of it, that is.'

‘I wasn't. It's weakening.'

‘How clever you are, Nurse Swanfield.'

‘So are you. You managed to tell me you had an
affaire
with Nola without actually saying it – which wasn't very gentlemanly of you, after all.'

‘Oh – I do so agree. But I don't think Nola minds who knows, so long as it's not her husband. She was only filling in time, in any case, waiting for Kit. That's why she came here, to find him a flat. And what did she find to go with it but a poor, struggling young artist – or so she imagined – in need of a muse to inspire him and organize him and make a household name of him. And if I
had
wanted that, then there'd have been nobody better than Nola to bring it off for me. She made a lot of plans on my account. Good plans – except that no plans are good where I'm concerned. That's about it. Then Kit arrived. And plans are just his style. She got busy persuading her Crozier cousins to give him a decent salary and a percentage of the profits he's bound to make, and to let him tear the place to pieces and build it up again just as he thinks best. And she decided my pictures were no good. Let's say she's right. Will you take the flat?'

‘I might.'

The kettle boiled. He arranged a tray casually, quickly, and when they returned to the living room Kit Hardie was there, smiling, taking control, larger and infinitely healthier than Euan, calmer than Nola, more self-possessed than Claire; a man without formal education who was, nevertheless, far more capable of adding and subtracting life's complexities than any of them.

‘Milk and sugar, Major?' enquired Euan, deliberately playing the servant. But it would take more than that, more than Euan whose own opportunities, Kit knew, had burned in the same fire as his illusions, to offend him. Kit had disliked the slaughter in France as much as anybody, had never, in fact, fired a gun at man or beast other than in the course of battle, whereas Euan, he supposed, must have brought down his share of partridge and pheasant every season and assisted at the ritual tearing to pieces of foxes which Kit himself abhorred. Yet Euan, who had gone to war a boy, had returned as a wraith inside a young man's body. Whereas Kit, already a practised survivor, had survived.

When Euan Ash had strolled into the Crown, looking like a vagrant bricklayer, sounding like a young and by no means humble squire, offering to do anything that would pay for a night's lodging or two, Kit had had no need to ask why. And when he had subsequently offered to replaster and repaint the complicated hotel ceilings for a crate of whisky, he had understood that too. If, tomorrow morning, Euan should not appear and should never be seen again, he would know better than to enquire. So too, he imagined, would Claire, whose experience of warfare must surely have taught her to recognize that wraith in Euan and to know that there would be no cure. Otherwise – already – he would not have cared to place her so much in Euan's company. He gave her time to drink her tea and then, having shown her the pale green bedroom, explained the window catches, the details of the rent, the disposition of the neighbours and of a certain stray cat, he managed to whisk her away into the garden without giving her time to make her own intentions clear.