Kissing Kin (26 page)

Pain forced him awake, and he was lying on his back in the hay with a lantern being held close to his head, and the girl was bathing the wound. The warm water in the basin beside him was the colour of blood. He lay still, breathing rather noisily, and heard her say, “I am sorry—sorry you woke up—I have got to sew it. I will do the best I can.”

He looked up at her in the lantern light—he could still see with his right eye—and her young face was perfectly white, even the lips, with dark, dilated eyes.

“Don’t worry, it can’t hurt worse than it does,” he said grimly, and saw the gleam of the needle and the length of thread between her hands, and blackness closed in again.

The sharp bite of wine on his tongue came next—he coughed and swallowed with difficulty. An arm was behind his head and the cup stayed at his lips. “Once more,” the girl’s
voice said gently. “Try to take a little more.” He swallowed again, and again, and she eased him back against the hay. The wound was covered with a bandage now, which came over the whole left side of his head, and there was a strong smell of wine everywhere, for she had used it to sterilize, having nothing else.

“Is my eye gone?” he asked as soon as he could find the breath to speak.

“No. But the wound runs very close, and there will be a long scar. I did the best I could. It took seven stitches. You have lost a lot of blood. You must stay quiet a while.”

“I can’t stay here. It will mean trouble for you if they come this way.”

“Trouble!” Her voice was scornful. “We are used to that!”

“What’s that noise?” he said, listening. “Guns!”

“Yes. Nearer now. We think they are on this road. My father has gone to find out what he can in the village.”

He tried to sit up, and she pressed him back gently into the hay.

“Not yet. It is still a long way off. My father will warn you in time. As soon as you are able to travel we will take the cart—I will go along as protection—”

“Where?”

“There is a way—others have escaped—if we are not already cut off.”

“How many others?”

“Two that I know of. Of course we cannot always be sure that they are successful. But we try.”

When she had gone away with the lantern he lay very still in the dark, tense with the effort to think clearly. Once he had known very well exactly what he meant to do if anything like this happened to him. Now his carefully laid plans were all a jumble of pain and darkness and confusion and urgency, and he could not sort them out behind the jumping agony in his head. The idea of Jenny’s letter returned to him first—it was buttoned as usual inside his tunic. He fumbled a hand in to it—
rather a short one this time, written on thin bluish paper. Impossible to touch a match to it in the midst of all this hay. He set to work patiently in the dark, with short intervals for rest. When he had finished, the letter lay in minute shredded bits, a mere mouse’s nest of fragments in the hay.

Then after another long pause a second duty occurred to him. With unbelievable effort, he roused again and removed his identity disc and pushed it down, down into the hay. What else?

While he was wondering the day broke, and the girl returned with soup in a little pail and a hunk of bread. The guns seemed less noticeable in the dawn, and there was no news. Her father had not returned. She sat beside him patiently in the hay, while the hot, still hours slid by with the mutter of gunfire—gave him water to drink, and presently a bit more food—boiled fowl, a mouthful of cabbage. It was growing dark again in the barn when he heard her stir and said uneasily, “Are you going?”

“Not for long. I hear my father, I think—at last.”

Noise grew and grew outside his consciousness—confusion, voices, commands—a rumbling of motor cars and tramping of many feet—too late now—the retreat was upon him. He heard the girl’s voice, high, shrill, hysterical—heard something like a slap, and she was still. Men poured into the barn, rustling through the hay, shouting, swearing, barking orders—men who spoke German.

Hands were laid on him roughly, he was pulled to his feet, stood sick and swaying while a light was flashed in his face. Fenton would have minded this more, perhaps, as his particular nightmare was being taken prisoner—had Fenton died, or was it happening to him too, somewhere? German orders were incomprehensible, but German manhandling was easy enough to understand. Too many of them had hold of him at once, he tried to keep his footing, stumbled, and they let him fall heavily, striking the bandaged side of his head on a German boot, so that oblivion came again.

S
HOT DOWN IN FLAMES
. The news came to Calvert at Farthingale in a letter from Raymond’s C.O. only a few days before the Armistice. Two specks in the sky above him which Raymond never saw turned into two Camels which arrived in time to engage and down the single Fokker which had done for him and to mark the inaccessible spot where he fell, and his burning plane. Dreadful news, which quenched the family excitement and joy over the end of the war and laid a heavy hand on the preparations for a Christmas that in spite of the loss of Archie would hold for some of them reunion and fulfilment. Virginia was being what everyone called Magnificent, and there was hope that in Oliver’s and Calvert’s case no permanent damage had been done. Even with Archie’s death, they knew that for so large a family they had got off very lightly.

Dinah arrived in England with Jeff almost simultaneously with the Armistice, and was staying at Farthingale where Bracken came for a brief holiday after witnessing the doings at Paris which ended hostilities. Phoebe had not seen her infant son since she sailed on the
Lusitania
three years before. He was five now, a thoughtful, dignified child with his father’s long
head and Phoebe’s level eyes. Dinah had played fair and not tried to usurp his mother’s place. He was quite clear in his mind as to his relationship with Phoebe, and understood that she had gone to help nurse wounded soldiers as Dinah couldn’t do, because Dinah was such a crock and had fainted in the middle of the floor and been sent home—just in time, as it happened, to keep him company. Phoebe’s photograph had kept her image plain, and he recognized her at once and went to her without hesitation when she entered the living-room at Farthingale on a November afternoon.

It was Phoebe who was self-conscious and uncertain of her welcome, idiotically nervous of this meeting with a child who even at her breast had seemed a stranger after his father’s sudden death. It was not that she didn’t like children—but she had had very little experience with them at home or in her bachelor-girl days in New York before her marriage, and she was not instinctively a maternal woman. Children were people to her, not toys or puppies, but people from a slightly different world with which she was not on intimate terms. She got along well enough with Virginia’s on her rare visits to
Farthingale
by treating them with respect or letting them alone, and they admired her and were polite and flattered when she made conversation with them. Unlike Dinah, whose heart had never grown up, Phoebe had no inborn knack with children. And she had always been a little afraid of Jeff as a baby for fear he might be sick, or start crying, or she might drop him, or do the wrong thing.

She had reckoned without the unaccountable lump which rose in her throat at sight of the sturdy, independent little figure which advanced across the carpet to meet her. Phoebe went down on her knees and held out her arms, wordlessly, and Jeff returned her kiss without shyness or reservations.

Then he saw Oliver.

None of them quite believed what happened then, but they all witnessed it, all of them gathered in the drawing-room that
drab autumn afternoon at tea-time—Sally was there, and Sosthène, Dinah and Bracken and Calvert, and Virginia who had come down from London with Phoebe and Oliver for the first week-end of Dinah’s homecoming. No one had yet said, ‘This is Oliver.’ No one had time. Oliver had come into the room behind Phoebe and paused a little distance from where she knelt for Jeff’s greeting. When Jeff’s eyes first fell on him, over Phoebe’s shoulder, the child left her without ceremony, his face alight with something like recognition.

“Hullo,” he said informally, and Oliver said “Hullo,” and held out both hands. Jeff put his hands in Oliver’s and looked back over his shoulder at the rest of them, smiling and
confident
, and somehow very proud. “It’s Oliver,” he told them gently. “My mother’s married to him.” And he looked up again into the composed face above him, at the red tabs and bright ribbons on the breast of the khaki tunic. “Are you a general yet?”

“Not yet, old boy, give me time,” said Oliver easily, not showing any of the surprise which had immobilized everyone else in the room, at Jeff’s assumption of lifelong acquaintance. With his arm around the child’s shoulders, they moved together towards the fire, and Oliver sat down in a big chair, Jeff leaning on the arm of it beside him.

“Will you teach me to shoot off a gun?” said Jeff, as though resuming a conversation between old friends.

“Absolutely.”

“You aren’t wearing one now.”

“Don’t need one at home like this.”

“And ride a horse? Will you teach me to ride a horse?”

“Positively. If we can find one that will stand up.”

Jeff laughed, and swung on the arm of the chair.

“You’re just like I thought,” he said. “Have you got a dog?”

“Not just at the moment. We’ll attend to that now that the war is over. What kind of a dog shall we get?”

Beyond the two by the fire, who had become oblivious to
them, the family pulled itself together, searched each other’s eyes, and tried to rationalize its feelings.

Oliver had given them the cue—Oliver the soldier, fatalistic, more or less unread, but accustomed to the margins of human behaviour at times of crisis, as well as to the humdrum routine of the Regulations. Oliver was willing to accept without any fuss that he was somehow already known to the child Phoebe had borne to another man, rebelliously loving himself every step of the way. Oliver warned them by his own casual behaviour not to make a song and dance about it and create hurdles in Jeff’s mind.

Phoebe, her moment of brief glory rudely shaken, rose from her knees where Jeff had left her and went to sit rather shakily on the sofa beside Sally. There was nothing rational, ever, about anything to do with herself and Jeff. The whole thing was some sort of fantastic mistake, a wild Olympian joke, a perpetual boomerang, just because she had married one man in spite of loving another and had tried conscientiously to be a wife and mother and build a life of her own. When Miles was snatched away like that, she was adrift again, rudderless,
confused
, frustrated, still loving Oliver, still drawn to him, forsaking all others—until on another fall of the cards it was suddenly possible, and their life together had begun. It had seemed as though Jeff, the stranger, the accident, the left-over from that brief interlude with Miles, would have no place here. And now look.

“But he must have seen a photograph of Oliver,” Sally was saying gropingly.

“I haven’t got one,” Dinah told them with some reluctance. “Oliver won’t sit. Oh, a few snapshots, of course, but he’s never taken any notice of those.”

Tea came in just then, followed by an assortment of children from upstairs who had been banished till after Jeff’s first
meeting
with his mother had been safely accomplished—Virginia’s Irene, Nigel, and Evadne, and Oliver’s Hermione, who went straight to his chair and flung her arms possessively about his
neck and kissed him. Jeff looked on at the greeting with frank interest, and Oliver said, “You knew, Hermione was my daughter before I married your mother.”

“Then I must be related to her,” said Jeff, ready to be pleased.

“You are, yes, in a sort of way, I suppose.”

“Not
blood
-related,” Hermione corrected at once. “You’re my step-brother. That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Means you belong to the same family from now on,” Oliver told them firmly. “It’s rather a large family—room for everyone in it. And that somehow reminds me—” Shedding the children, he rose and went to Phoebe where she sat beside Sally, who was pouring out tea. “Kendrick is in London. Remember him?”

“Yes, of course.” Phoebe looked up with a reminiscent smile. “On the
Lusitania
. Rather a dear. I’d like to see him again.”

“Saw him myself this morning before I left town. He’ll be round about for a while, he’s had a bad go of influenza. He has promised to do everything possible about tracing Raymond through the Red Cross at Geneva, but he says that if Raymond got gathered up in the retreat there’s no telling where he is now or when we’ll hear. Unless he is able to let us know himself, that is.”

“You mean, if he wasn’t killed in the crash,” Calvert said steadily.

“Yes. Wounded or a prisoner, he may still turn up. A lot of missing people are turning up, you know.”

There was a little silence, while the tea-cups went round.
Shot
down
in
flames,
the pitiless squadron record ran.
Missing,
believed
dead.
The words were almost audible in the firelit room behind the clink of china and silver.
Shot
down
in
flames
….

“He was one of the ones we needed to go on with,” said Sally after a moment.

Camilla had steadfastly resisted the temptation to devote herself to Calvert at Farthingale by relinquishing her work at the St. James’s Square hospital. Calvert was progressing as well as could be expected, pampered by Sally and Virginia’s
household
, sustained by Sosthène’s male presence and the week-end or tea-time visits of Camilla and Jenny. But just as Jenny had wisely prophesied long ago, the wounded were not
miraculously
healed overnight by the Armistice, the hospital drudgery must go on, and the need for nursing would abate only slowly. Jenny was kept so busy, she said, that they saw very little of her, and for all their devotion to her the twins never suspected what the news about Raymond had meant to her. Her thinness and whiteness made Calvert’s heart ache, and a new listlessness in her manner had set Camilla worrying that Winifred was demanding too much of Jenny’s strength as a willing VAD, but Jenny scoffed at the idea of a holiday and assured them that she was as strong as a horse.

Camilla too had found a certain refuge in the hard work in London, convincing herself over and over again that to see Sosthène only now and then and from the necessary distance was no real help to her longing for him, and that she was better off away. Both girls from different reasons and unknown to each other felt a growing dread of the Christmas season as it came upon them with its burden of memories from the year before.

Archie would not be there to read off the presents, and as it was impossible to conceive of anyone else doing it in his place the ceremony was tacitly dispensed with. The tree, fully trimmed, would stand in its accustomed place at the end of the drawing-room, but the gifts would all be distributed informally during the day. The floor would be cleared for dancing as usual, and the gramophone would make a cheerful noise. Dinah and little Jeff were entitled to a semblance of the
old-time
family Christmas. Bracken would come back from Paris, Oliver and Phoebe would come down from London, bringing the convalescent Kendrick with them for a breath of country
air after his influenza, and as many as could be spared from the Hall were of course expected. Jenny had tried unaccountably to beg off, but as the Duke had accepted with enthusiasm she was overruled and would have to come. And there would be enough children present to keep the day from bogging down.

Although two people were missing from last year’s dinner table the total count, with Edward home and the Floods both there, would be higher this time. Camilla looked slowly from face to face as the soup came in, noticing that through some freak of absentmindedness on Virginia’s part or some deliberate intention, most of last year’s guests had been put in the same chairs that they had occupied a year ago. Calvert was in
Raymond’
s place to-night, between herself and Virginia. Sosthène had taken over Archie’s duties as host. But Adrian Carteret was on her left again, with young Daphne beyond, wearing her seventeen-year-old heart on her sleeve for him, which he seemed to find both surprising and touching and he was handling it very well. Fabrice was between Gerald and the newcomer, Kendrick, whom everybody at once liked very much for himself as well as because he had stood beside Phoebe while the deck of the
Lusitania
tilted and sank beneath them. He had a quirky, laughing face with pointed eyebrows, and carried himself like an officer-born in the becoming Red Cross uniform he had worn all through the war, driving ambulances he himself equipped and presented a little faster than they could be shot out from under him. An only son, he had drawn freely on the resources of an old Philadelphia family fortune, and had also spent himself recklessly in the service of the wounded. When he went home he would be regarded as a hero, and he more or less deserved it, but it would never go to his head. Nothing went to Kendrick’s head, not fear, nor liquor, nor women.

Within a few hours of his first meeting with Fabrice, the family had begun to watch with a growing interest which threatened soon to become breathless, as it dawned on them
one by one that he was actually laughing at her. Not unkindly, not rudely, but as though he found her inexpressibly funny, like something on the stage which was not meant to be quite real. She at once smelled his money, and she liked his looks, and she began accordingly to flirt with him. Instead of falling flat on his face as he was expected to do, Kendrick not only flirted right back at her but went her one better at it, as though it was a kind of game, as though he was one move ahead of her, as though he had played the same scene before. Bracken was the first to catch on, and he murmured delightedly to Phoebe, “He’s got her pitch and queered it. He’s treating her like a high-priced tart, and she’s falling for it.” Phoebe grinned at him. “Oh, is that how you treat them?” she said. Gerald was sulking, but nobody felt very sorry for him.

Jenny in her chair next to Oliver, wearing a pretty frock and her mother’s pearls, was trying not to think at all, but it wasn’t a success. A year ago this very minute she had been scarcely aware of Raymond sitting beside Virginia at the end of the table—the place where Calvert sat now, trying to catch her eyes across his glass. But the relentless evening stretched ahead of her with its inevitable milestones—the way Raymond had come towards her, with Bracken, when the men returned to the drawing-room—his delight over the watch and the mechanical insect—the winding of the gramophone between glasses of champagne—the strange, gay, exciting left-handed waltz—Bracken running up the stairs to see what had become of him—her own first sight of him on the edge of the bath-tub looking sick above the scarlet splashes on the porcelain—Phoebe’s anxious face and her own aching arm as she sat beside him with her fingers on the artery—the long battle for his life after the doctor came, and the pale, triumphant dawn—suppose Raymond had died then, under her hand—better for him like that, perhaps—better than being shot down in flames….