The House at Tyneford (34 page)

“Do you not like champagne?” asked Mr. Rivers, seeing I was not drinking. “I can order something else, if you prefer.”

“Oh, no, thank you. It’s lovely.”

I reached for the glass and gulped down the liquid in a few swallows. There was a pleasant buzzing in my head. There was no linen on the table, only a waxed cloth that felt slightly sticky beneath my fingers. Mr. Rivers ordered quail eggs and poached salmon and hot cucumbers and we ate a sort of trifle made with eggless custard for dessert. It tasted mainly of brandy and the buzzing in my ears built to a roar. The dining room was almost empty. A tired-looking man in army uniform lunched across from a woman with startling dyed-yellow hair, and in the far corner two old ladies in thick beige stockings sipped tea and gossiped beside the fireless grate. I couldn’t help but think of Café Sperl or the Demel and the mirrored coffeehouses of Vienna, where the towers of pastries and chocolates were reflected into infinity and neat waitresses in black and white glided between the tables, pouring creamy hot chocolate from polished silver jugs.

When we had finished eating, Mr. Rivers ordered a cigar and a glass of port. Leaning back in his chair, he laughed softly.

“This is rather awful, isn’t it?” he asked. “Think we might have been better to have stayed at home, opened a bottle of the ’23 Latour and let Mrs. E. cook.”

I smiled. Mr. Rivers did not know that it was usually me who now prepared his bourguignon or rhubarb sponge.

“No. It’s lovely. Just the war’s all. Makes it difficult.”

“Yes, well, if they’re going to stay open, might as well try to be a bit less grotty.”

He took a puff on his cigar. “When Kit’s home, we’ll take a trip to London. I’ll take you both to the Savoy and we can celebrate properly.”

At the mention of Kit we both fell silent, and at that moment I did not want to go back to the empty house. It was my birthday and I wanted to forget for an hour.

“Mr. Rivers, let’s stay out a little longer, please.”

He looked at me in surprise and then he seemed glad. “All right. Well, we could go to the pictures, I suppose.”

The Dorchester Picture Palace was showing
Rebecca.
Mr. Rivers purchased two tickets, right at the back, and we tiptoed in, the main feature having already started. The auditorium was thick with smoke, and I stared at the screen through a yellow fog. We elbowed our way to our seats, stumbling over the tangles of embracing sweethearts, who grumbled at our interruption. The seats at the rear were cramped and, as the airman sleeping beside me half sprawled onto my lap, I was forced to edge closer to Mr. Rivers. I watched, enthralled, as the young Mrs. de Winter fluttered through the house. The screen filled with the writhing sea and a timber boat bounced like a toy on the waves, and I shuddered, relieved Kit was aboard a proper ship. I had not been to the cinema in England, and I loved the ribald atmosphere—the audience cajoled and cheered the actors as though it was a live stage play. I belonged among them—squire, former housemaid/ refugee, army officers, shop girls and WAAFs—we were just an audience, united by the story on the big screen. I forgot the world beyond the picture and I was happy.

We did not speak during the drive home. It began to rain and drops thrum-thrummed against the glass, while the motorcar roared through puddles, throwing up water as brown as milky tea. I must have fallen asleep, for the next moment we were drawing up outside the house. Mrs. Ellsworth was waiting on the front steps. She clasped an umbrella with both hands, but it threatened to take off like a frightened bird. Filled with instant dread, I was opening the car door before it had even stopped. I hurled myself out, oblivious to the cascading rain, tore across the drive and ran up the steps, two at a time.

“It’s Kit—,” she started.

“Oh, God, oh, God,” I said.

I looked past Mrs. Ellsworth into the gloom of the hall. Kit sat in a rather splendid wheelchair, his leg out in front, sporting my hideous hand-stitched mauve bed jacket. “Hullo,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

K
it was in plaster for six weeks. The cause of his injury was a source of considerable irritation to him. His ship had seen some brief skirmishes as part of an escort protecting merchant convoys in the North Atlantic from the wolf packs. Two officers had been injured and a midshipman killed by mines while running exercises, but Kit’s broken ankle was more ignominious, caused by slipping on an icy deck during night watch off the coast of Norway. The ship’s doctor set his leg, but on returning to Scapa Flow, Kit was transferred to land and sent home to recover. There was no room on the tightly packed corvette for an injured sailor.

Considering that he was usually quite content to lounge upon the sofa smoking endless cigarettes and devouring the
Sporting Life
, he was an awful patient, always fidgeting and complaining that he was bored. I noticed that he smoked even more, if it were possible, and that he looked older. He had filled out a little, and necessarily confined to lolling in an armchair he lost that restless quick movement that always made him seem so boyish. He was in some considerable pain, and I think the cigarettes and morning whisky were ways of distracting himself. We sat for hours in the warm fug of the drawing room, the fire stoked to a furnace by Mr. Wrexham despite our protestations. I read novels aloud to entertain him, always the latest lurid romance—the more absurd the language of love, the more he liked them. Whenever my voice grew hoarse and I paused, he’d wave impatiently, cigarette between his fingers. “Well, go on.”

I laughed at him. “You’re unbearable. You read it.”

He shook his head and fixed me with a lazy smile. “No. I like to hear you. Especially the wicked parts. They make you blush, you know.”

It was fortunate in some ways that Kit’s injury forced a certain distance between us. In his letters, he had confided desires and breathless acts of love. At first they were fervent, schoolboy imaginings, the language one might expect of a love-struck gentleman who had once attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, but then, after a month or more on board his ship, they grew coarser and more thrilling. I knew I ought to be shocked, or angry and repulsed. I was not. I was intrigued and baffled by these new words that my faithful German/English dictionary could not explain. The mysterious words were as exotic as the half-understood acts that they failed to describe. I was forced to imagine the pictures that these guttural, consonant clicking sounds represented. Unconstrained by meaning, my imaginings were frantic. Kit’s descriptions of lovemaking might only have taken place in the pages of his letters, but I had read and reread them, picturing them in the warm dark every night as I lay in bed, quite unable to sleep. We were both conscious of some shared intimacy, like adolescents the day after a kiss at a school dance, at once shy and eager.

“Read some more,” said Kit, stroking my cheek with his fingers.

“Later. My voice is all hoarse.”

“Your necklace,” he said, noticing Anna’s pearls beneath the collar of my shirt.

“Do you like them? They were my mother’s.”

He reached a hand behind my neck and drew me close, kissing me. As he let go, he unfastened another button on my shirt and traced the pearls with a finger, brushing the bare skin at my throat.

“They are very pretty.”

I let him kiss me and toy with the pearls. I was pleased that his attention was wholly upon me. The minute he returned to Tyneford, I knew that for the first time I had a rival. One much fiercer than Diana or Juno; a rival I had to accept and learn to live with for the duration of the war. Kit loved me, but his loyalty was torn between the two of us: the
Angelica
and me. He was glad to be home and to sit and chatter beside the fire, but it wasn’t like before. A part of him yearned to be at sea. He hated being here while she was somewhere in the Atlantic, scouring the waters for U-boats and enemy destroyers. His shipmates risked their lives while he lazed on the sofa sipping cocoa and eating ginger biscuits.

“Tell me what it’s like to be at sea,” I said.

Kit fell silent. He did not speak about life on the ship. He claimed his reticence was because of secrecy, but I suspected that it was simply easier. When on board he needed to become another version of himself, Temporary Sublieutenant Rivers, and now at home he wanted to be Kit again. He did not wish to be one man, while speaking of the other. I did not push him, although later I wished I had.

When we were not reading together in the drawing room or taking meals in the morning room, Kit liked to sit outside. He wheeled himself onto the terrace, discarding the tartan blankets Mrs. Ellsworth insisted on tucking about him, and, armed instead with a hip flask of brandy, sat for hours with the old nursery telescope trained on the sea. To the gardener’s dismay, he liked to propel himself across the lawn, the chair’s wheels leaving two neat trenches. He sat at the end of the garden, where the line of bright grass cut into the blue horizon, and scrutinised the sea for ships. Mr. Wrexham sometimes joined him, and the two men sat together, one head white as a laundered handkerchief, the other as gold as harvest, passing the telescope back and forth between them. The butler carried out a low table and placed the portable wireless set upon it. Kit listened to it almost constantly, craning forward in his chair whenever the naval news came over the airwaves, as though he could get closer to the action. Whenever there was something about a Flower-class corvette, his fists would clench, and he’d hold his breath. There was no mention of the
Angelica.

The day Kit’s leg was taken out of plaster, Poppy returned home for a few days’ leave. She came straight to the house and joined us on the terrace, where Kit was slowly limping up and down with the aid of a walking stick. It was near the end of April and a damp morning ripened into a warm afternoon, the bright lichen on the roof tiles yellow as sunshine. I paced beside Kit, hovering at his elbow, anxious as a mother house martin as her chick first takes to the skies. He swore in frustration.

“Fuck.” He banged his stick against the drainpipe. “I’m like an old fucking man.”

I’d never heard him curse like this before, and I halted for a second before helping him to sit on the wooden bench. Poppy leaned against the wall, closing her eyes in the spring sun. “Oh,” she said, “swear like a sailor now, Kit? Bit of a cliché.”

He smiled and pulled me onto his good knee, kissing my nose. “Sorry, darling. Just not used to being a blasted cripple.”

“You’re not. You’ll be better before you know it,” I said, forcing myself to smile, conscious that as soon as his leg healed, he’d depart for the
Angelica.

“How’s Will?” asked Kit, changing the subject and looking at Poppy.

“I don’t know. He sailed for France just before you came home. He was all right, last I heard. Wrote asking me for scraps of French and to check that someone’s looking after his plants and feeding that horrid cat. Don’t think they’re doing much. Training. Waiting for something to happen. Last I heard, only thing he’d shot was a rabbit.”

“Nazi rabbit, I hope,” said Kit.

Poppy smiled. “No Nazis in sight. Not sure who all this waiting is worse for—us or them. And the post’s been a bit ropey the last few weeks.”

Her voice was playful, feigning unconcern, but I didn’t believe it.

“I say, shall we call for some drinks? I know it’s only teatime but I fancy something stronger,” she added, slumping into a chair.

I disappeared to ask Mr. Wrexham for some wine, and when I returned with a bottle, the two of them were sitting in silence, huddled around the wireless.

“Denmark’s surrendered,” said Kit, fixing himself a drink. “God knows what’s happening in Norway. Half the navy’s probably up there.”

“What does it mean for France?” asked Poppy.

“I don’t know,” said Kit, passing her a glass. “The western front is going to have to open up sometime. Our boys are ready for them.”

This formed the pattern of the ensuing days. We lazed in the garden, warmed by gentle sunshine, listening to the wireless, often drinking rather too much wine, while the cuckoos called from Rookery Wood and the fishing boats dawdled in the bay. I remember every day as a warm, unbroken blue. It had the feel of the last weeks of the summer holidays, when school looms and yet belongs so completely to another world that one can scarce believe the sun-filled days of freedom could ever end. Lying on a picnic rug, I tried to count the newly ripened freckles on Kit’s nose and did not think it was possible to love him more than I did at that moment. I helped him with his exercises and his stride grew stronger as we spied our first spotted flycatcher alighting on the flowering plum. He discarded his stick the same day as a pair of holly blue butterflies flitted across a spray of irises. By the time the pale pink London pride bloomed in the rockery, he could walk smoothly with only slight pain. I tried not to wish Poppy away, but these were stolen days and I wanted Kit to myself.