Good Hope Road: A Novel (6 page)

‘A clothed mirror?’ Jim asked, puzzled. He’d never heard his father call it that, or anything else, for that matter. As far as he knew, it had always just been ‘the mirror’.

‘Claude,’ she laughingly corrected. ‘Pronounced like “road”; the name, as in Monet.’ She walked, entranced, over to where it hung, examining the convex black surface of the glass. ‘Beautiful,’ she repeated.

She turned to Jim. ‘They were used by artists to get a better feel for landscape compositions and colour. There are so many tones in a single colour, so many variations of shade, from light to dark, and they’re notoriously difficult to capture on canvas. The Claude mirror,’ she gently tapped the frame, ‘it separates the tones so that only the most prominent are visible, making them easier to replicate. The old masters frequently used mirrors like these, setting one or more around their chosen subject and then painting the
reflection
, rather than the actual image.’

She hesitated, smiling at the Major. ‘Do you think . . . May I take it down, examine it more closely?’

He hated anyone handling the mirror, but the Major nodded reluctantly, the palpable sense of relief emanating from his son as he did so making him feel even more of a heel.

He sank deeper into his armchair, trying to regain his composure, brushing surreptitiously at the last of the moisture from his eye as Jim brought down the mirror from the wall. Madeleine bent eagerly over the glass. There was something so guileless about her absorption, her enthusiasm so contagious that the Major gradually began to feel righted again. The old memories beginning to blur about the edges, their vividness receding, sifting into shadow.

The rasp of his breathing eased, and slowly it began to feel feasible once more to buy into a notion of normalcy, to make believe that the past could be left to lie where it had fallen, stripped away like an undertone of no importance. That this was all that mattered: a fire in the grate, the pool of light it cast, and three people, spending an evening in its warmth.

Madeleine continued to examine the mirror, resting its base on a table and swivelling it this way and that as she explored the room through the reflection in the glass. Now tilting it to the ceiling, now towards a knot in the floorboards, returning time and again to the faces of the two men in the room, one young, the other not, both with identical, summer-sky eyes.

It was dark outside when she said she really ought to leave, flurries of snow beginning to swirl silently through the dusk. Quietly remarking that it was far too cold for him to step outside – a charming, and rather obvious subterfuge, given his weather-beaten cheeks – the Major excused himself, so that Jim and she might end the evening alone.

‘He’s lovely,’ she said as she buttoned her coat. That coquettish tilt of her head. ‘So what happened to the son?’

‘It skipped a generation, the loveliness,’ Jim said solemnly as he escorted her to the Ford.

She grinned, holding out a hand to a descending flake. It held there a moment, then drifted gracefully towards the ground.

He opened the door of the Ford for her and tucked in the edges of her coat before brushing away the frost that crusted the windshield. He came around to the driver’s side and she lowered the window.

‘Douggie Garland is throwing a grand gala the Saturday after next,’ she said. ‘He’s even ordered peacocks, real live peacocks, from some place down South.’ She leaned forward, grasping the wheel with gloved hands. ‘You should come.’

‘I should? And what if all I have to wear are beat-up overalls and a hunting cap?’

She laughed. ‘Well, then that’s what you’ll have to wear. Give everyone something to talk about.’

‘Maybe I will. Get my hunting rifle, bag a couple of peacocks while I’m at it.’

She laughed again. ‘So I’ll see you then?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ He pointed at the open window. ‘You really should roll that up, or the windshield will get fogged up.’

‘Mmm, I’ll take my chances.’

‘You will, will you?’

‘Yes. With the windshield, maybe even with men harbouring all sorts of secret
tidal longings
.’

‘You know,’ he said, leaning forward to rest his arms on the open window, ‘my father left out something. What he didn’t tell you is that no matter how strong the fever, or how far the Stonebridge men might go, they always return in the end.’

‘Well, Jim Stonebridge,’ she said insouciantly as she started the engine, ‘they must know a good thing when they see it.’

He waited until the lights disappeared down the drive and was whistling as he walked back into the house. It was quiet; his father must have gone to bed. He hoisted the mirror back on to the wall, and stoked the fire. Struck with a notion, he took down the mirror again and held it to the fireplace, watching as the dark surface of the glass came alive. The colours of the fire, red and orange, black, gold and blue, each muted but distinct in its reflection.

‘Clau-de mirror,’ he said, under his breath. He ran a finger over the frame, thinking of the way her hands had looked against it, slender, so delicate. He shook his head, feeling foolish, but grinning all the same as he hoisted the mirror back on to the wall. Settling into his father’s chair, he fiddled about with the knobs on the radio, and was soon absorbed in the game.

Upstairs, the Major lay curled up tight in his bed. Knees drawn in, hands tucked under, his entire body compacted, as if this forced density might anchor him, might hold him fast in the present. There was a pressure building within his chest, so intense that it hurt to breathe. He knew that ache well. Soon the voices would begin. Just a distant buzz at first. Then the shapes – of men and trees, blackened and torn. Of horses silhouetted against orange shell burst. A whinny of terror that cut to the bone; the voices growing louder, calling, reaching for him with phantom limbs.

The room was freezing cold, the bedclothes icy. When he had come upstairs, leaving Jim and Madeleine to their goodnights, a draught had nipped at his ankles, blowing frigid air across the landing and into the bedrooms. Worried that a shingle might have collapsed, he’d tracked the draught to the bathroom and seen that the boy had foolishly left the window open earlier that evening. Snow had been drifting in from the eaves for hours, powdering the windowsill and melting on to the floor. Still, buoyed by how well the evening had turned out, the Major had been more amused than annoyed.

He’d been looking for something to mop the floor with when he’d happened to glance outside. Something shifted within him, the quiet humour of an instant ago dissolving in the faint gleam of snow from the darkness outside. A memory, dredged from the past, of the final denouement of that evening long ago.

A man, dancing, or what passes for it. He looks at the windows, thinking longingly of the ice-rimmed woods. Damp with sweat, he limps on. His wife leans in to say something; his stomach turns, and falling to his knees, he throws up. The meat from his dinner, the copious amounts of wine that he has drunk – he brings it all up, continuing to retch even after there’s nothing left. He rests his forehead against the floor, eyes closed, when he realises that it is very quiet in the room. The band has stopped playing.

‘Too much to drink,’ someone says.

The lurch of shame is replaced with a sudden, cold rage, an unspoken fury against these fools with their white slippers and dance parties and no idea of what it is like out there. He staggers upright, throwing off his wife’s hands as she tries to help. There is only one thought in his head: to be as far from here as possible.

‘Please, continue playing,’ he hears his wife say tremulously to the band as he leaves the room.

He stands in the hallway, staring towards the living room, drawn inevitably to the mirror that hangs there in knowing silence. He is gripped once again by the sense that this is all a dream, this world outside the war. Except he is slowly coming to realise now that it is not the world, but he who has changed, and that nothing here can ever make sense to him again. His body is coiled tight, choked with despair. He wants only to leave, to head out the door and keep walking, through the blue silence of the woods, past the frozen river, to the very ends of the earth, with only starred sky and cool, crisp snow to catch him as he falls. Blindly he stumbles towards the mirror, uncaring of – in some ways even welcoming – the pain arcing down his leg.

There is a movement in the shadows and he freezes, muscles tensing instinctively into combat mode. His eyes are wide, the pupils dilated in the half-light. It’s not the Boche, however; only his boy, waving a hand through the railings. The child is thrilled at this unexpected company, leaning over the balustrade and beaming from ear to ear as his father comes up the stairs. A gap-toothed smile; he lost a tooth earlier that week. The staircase is in shadow and the boy cannot see the expression on his father’s face.

The man is filled with fury, an unreasonable, unthinking, adrenaline-fuelled rage. He bounds up the stairs, two at a time, the adrenaline masking the white hot pain in his leg. A couple of strides and he is upon the child.

‘What are you doing here? Didn’t your mother tell you to go to bed?’

The boy looks blankly at him, only making him angrier. He smacks his son across the face with so much force that the child is nearly knocked off his feet.

‘Stay in your room. Stay in your
room
. Didn’t I tell you to stay down?’ The child bursts into tears and runs to his room, cradling his stinging cheek in his hand and nearly tripping over his nightshirt in his fright.

‘
Reste
z
en bas
!’ the man shouts furiously at his retreating form, ‘I told you to stay down!’

It is only then that he realises he’s speaking French. He’s been shouting in French at the boy all along, who understands not a word.

Moving tiredly as he remembered, every joint in his body suddenly that of a much older man, the Major had shut the bathroom window. Picking up the washcloth that Jim had tossed in the corner earlier that evening, he had mopped the water from the floor.

April 1932

t still hadn’t stopped snowing, even a week after she’d left; at least it seemed that way to him. The sluggish passage of the days, the dreariness of leaden skies, the oppressive monotony of snow, collecting against the walls. Where once he might have taken pleasure in the gleam of rime frost on a leaf hanging solitary on a branch, or in the paw print upon some lonely bank, now all he felt was restlessness. She’d been, and gone, and there was shape and heft to her absence, a weight to the space she left behind.

The house felt stifling. The Major was sunk in one of his drinking binges, seemingly bent upon finishing as much of the bootlegged Canadian finest stockpiled in the cellar as was humanly possible. Bottles littered the side table and the floor around his armchair as he stared emptily into the Claude mirror. There was little to see except the reflection of the snow as it fell outside, each flake contracting then expanding as it traversed the curvature of the glass.

Jim had thought that the Major and Madeleine had got along well. So lighthearted had he felt after her visit that, accustomed as he was to his father’s sudden shifts in mood and withdrawals into stony silence, the Major’s subsequent disavowal of the evening caught him by surprise. The Major did not refer to her visit at all, not the next morning, nor in the days that followed. Jim waited, but when there was nothing forthcoming – ‘She said you were charming,’ he offered, almost shyly, in a bid to open the conversation. He shoved his hands in his pockets, drew them out again, fiddled with his belt. ‘“Lovely,” I believe is the actual word she used.’

The Major said nothing in reply and at first Jim thought he hadn’t heard, until he saw the giveaway twitch of his father’s eye and knew otherwise. He waited an instant longer, for acknowledgement, for something, anything, but all the Major did was lift the whisky to his mouth once more.

Jim strode from the room, filled with a tight, hurt anger.

He spent most of his time in the barn after that, tinkering with the motorbike; when Ellie came in later that week and brightly asked how the young flatlander’s visit had gone, both men said nothing. She saw the bottles, and the look on Jim’s face, and knew better than to press further. She cleared away the litter without comment and busied herself in the kitchen, offering what comfort she knew: an apple pie with raisins plump with brandy from the cellar and just the way Jim liked it, a toasted, cinnamon scent warming the house to the eaves all that evening.