“Your father was wrong. You are … striking. Probably unprincipled, and certainly tempting. Provocative, too, as I am sure you are aware. And so I think that—on consideration—yes.”
With which, Stern bent his head and kissed her on the lips. Possibly this kiss was intended to be a brief one, a seemly one. If so, the intentions were not fulfilled. It became protracted. It became an embrace; it became an intimate embrace, and the quality of that embrace startled both of them.
They broke apart, looked at each other, then reached out again. Constance’s arms locked around Stern’s neck; his arms tightened around her waist. Constance, who seemed greatly aroused, opened her lips; she gave a small moan, which might have been of pleasure or distress. She reached for his hand and pressed it against her breasts. Then, in a kind of angry ecstasy, she pressed herself close against him; feeling him harden, she gave a cry of triumph.
When, finally, they parted, neither was composed. They looked at each other with a cautious respect, like two combatants. Constance’s eyes glittered; her cheeks were flushed. She smiled, then began to laugh. Stepping forward, she took Stern’s hand.
“Tell me you did not expect this.”
“I did not expect it.” Amusement deepened in his eyes. “Why? Did you, Constance?”
“No. How could I have? I suspected … but I might have been wrong. It might have been … forgettable.”
“And it wasn’t?”
“Not in the least. It was … addictive.”
“Dangerously addictive, I should say. I must have lost my reason. However …”
He reached for her again, but before he could take her in his arms, there came the sound of footsteps on the landing outside, a discreet cough. Then the door opened upon the figure of Maud’s butler, an elderly man.
It was an intrusion of farce, Constance thought. She moved back and, with commendable presence of mind, began to speak. She was just praising the Cézannes, and requesting she now be shown the further paintings in the hall, when she registered the expression on the servant’s face. He appeared neither suspicious nor shocked. At first Constance took this for good training on his part; then she observed something else: The man’s face had an ashen look. In his hand, which was shaking, he held a silver salver. Upon the salver lay a telegram.
“It is for Lady Callendar, sir.” The man looked up at Stern and then away. “The boy took it to Park Street, and they sent him straight here. I was not sure, sir, if I should take it up directly. I thought it best to inquire of you. In the circumstances you might feel it more appropriate, I thought, to speak to Lady Callendar first.”
The man’s voice faded. Both Stern and Constance stared at the tray, and at the envelope, of unmistakably military origin. They knew these envelopes, and their implications, as everyone did. There was a silence; then Stern said in a crisp voice, “You did quite rightly. Constance, we must return to the others. I will speak to Gwen. Someone must be with her. Maud. And Freddie—yes, it had better be Freddie.”
Constance did as she was told. She watched everything happen at one remove. She saw Stern enter the drawing room and cross to Gwen. She saw Gwen’s face lift, and her smile falter. She heard the conversation in that corner dwindle and saw the sudden jerk with which Maud looked up, to catch the warning in Stern’s eyes. Gwen stood. The new tension in the room communicated itself to Freddie and to Steenie. They, too, rose; they followed their mother, Maud, and Stern from the room.
The door closed on them. There were some nervous whispers from the other guests, then a silence. It can be only one of two people, said a clear and precise voice in Constance’s mind. Either it is Boy. Or Acland.
She turned and, moving away from the others, crossed to the long windows that overlooked the park. The day was fine and the park was crowded. Constance saw a woman carrying parcels, another woman dressed in unseasonable furs, with a bright little dog on a scarlet leash. A child with a hoop; a horse-drawn delivery van pausing near the gates. Constance saw these things, and these strangers, with that brilliant clarity which is the by-product of shock.
She rested her hands against the windowpane, which was cold. Behind her the other guests were beginning to speak once more. She could hear the hiss of their speculation, and because she knew that even those most sympathetic derived a certain glee from disaster, she would have liked to round on them, to scream at them, to act the savage, as she had done once before, six years before, when they had brought her father back to Winterscombe and she was still a child.
Instead, when it became unbearable to remain still a second longer, she turned to the door. She ran out upon the landing and stared down fearfully at a closed door at the end of the hall. They had gone into the morning room downstairs; she could catch the murmur of voices. Then, cutting through them and rising above them, came the sound of one long cry.
Constance ran to the stairs and hastened down them. She wanted to burst into the room, to demand to know—at once—what had happened, but when she reached the door, and heard the sound of weeping, she drew back.
She was excluded even now, even at a moment such as this. She was still the outsider. Did no one think to come out? Did no one think that she, too, ought to know? In a sudden rage of pain and fear, Constance turned back. She flung herself against the wall and covered her ears with her hands to block out the sound of Gwen’s weeping.
After a long while the door of the morning room opened and Montague Stern came out. He paused, looked at Constance’s tense body and bent head, then quietly closed the door behind him. He crossed to Constance, and when she did not turn, laid his hand on her arm. Constance at once swung around and clutched at him.
“Which? Which?” she cried. “Which of them is it? Tell me. I must know.”
“It is Acland,” Stern replied in a quiet voice, his eyes never leaving Constance’s face. “I am afraid it is Acland. He is missing. Believed killed.”
Stern had expected tears, but he was not prepared for the violence of Constance’s reaction. At his words, color came and went in her face and she gave a sharp cry, stepping back from him.
“Oh, damn him, damn him. He promised me. Damn him for dying.”
The vehemence with which the words were said surprised Stern. He made no reply, but stood still, watching her. He saw her eyes become vivid with tears, which she brushed aside with an angry hand. He saw her hands clench and her mouth move in a jagged grimace of pain. These things interested him, even at such a moment as that; he noted them, as he always noted the reactions of others, and then stored them away in his mind.
And perhaps, even in her anger and her grief, Constance saw the coolness of his appraisal, for her face grew tight with resentment. Then she made a spring and hit out at him.
“Don’t watch me so! Leave me alone! I hate to be watched.”
Stern did not move. He remained still while Constance’s small fists flailed against him: a hail of blows against his chest, arms, and shoulders. When the force of those blows began to diminish, Stern made a sudden movement and caught hold of Constance’s wrists. He held them in a tight grip while Constance writhed and struggled with a kind of impotent fury.
This seemed to enrage Constance even more, for she twisted against his strength; then, apparently for no reason, she became quiet and ceased her struggles. She looked up into his face as if she had decided to submit, although there was nothing of submission in her eyes. They looked at each other, and then Stern relaxed his hold.
He glanced back, once, over his shoulder, toward the closed door and the sounds of Gwen’s weeping. Then he stepped forward a little.
“Cry,” he said, and in a practiced manner he took Constance in his arms.
When, finally, they left Maud’s house, it was in a sad procession: Steenie and Freddie supporting Gwen, who could barely walk, Maud fluttering at her side, Constance bringing up the rear. As Constance passed Stern on the steps, moving out into sunlight so bright it shocked her eyes, a small piece of paper was pressed into her han
d.
Later, when she unfolded it, she found it contained the address of Stern’s chambers in Albany, that separate establishment he had always kept up for the sake of Maud’s reputation. It was a place that Constance had never visited.
Under this address he had written: Any afternoon at three. Constance stared at this missive for some time, then crumpled it and threw it across the room.
I shall not go, she thought to herself. I shall not go. But that night she rescued the scrap of paper and considered it again. It was—and this did not surprise her—both unaddressed and unsigned.
IV
MARRIAGES
From the journals
Park Street,
July 3, 1916
LAST NIGHT I DREAMED of Acland. He rose up from the ranks of the dead. He came to my room; he stayed with me there, all through the night. He had come to say goodbye—he would not come again.
I was not afraid. I told him all my truths. I confessed I had been to Jenna’s room and read the letters—even that Acland understood: He knew, if he had not died, I would never have done it. He said: All that was past now. He showed me why and how he had broken his promise. He died of a thrust from a bayonet; he showed me the wound below his heart; he let me rest my hand upon it.
Over a thousand men died the same day, he said: What was one more death among so many? Look, Acland said—and he showed me the place where he died. It was no place, barren as far as the eye could see. There was no grass, no bushes, no trees, no hope. It made me afraid, that place; I recognised it; I thought I had been there.
Acland said perhaps I had. He said it was a place we all knew, that it was inside each of us, waiting.
After that, we did not speak of death. He stayed with me, and untied all the knots, one by one.
When the dawn came, I wept. I knew he would leave me. Acland took a strand of his hair, which was as fine and red as Welsh gold. He bound it about my wedding finger; he made me his bride. We knew what we had always known, that we were one. We were: cut from the same rock, hewn from the same wood, forged from the same metal. We were closer than conspirators, than twins, than father and daughter. It was a fact. It had no end and no beginning. It was majestical!
Look, Acland said again. I turned my head. I saw the world in all its certainty and all its clarity. There were no doubts, paper, I promise you. In my dream there were no doubts. The world Acland gave me was made in heaven; from the smallest creature to the brightest star, I saw its symmetry.
But when I looked back, Acland was gone. It was a Sunday morning, and the bells were ringing.
Morning. Mourning. To wake. A wake.
Any afternoon at three. There is a lesser life to be lived, and Acland knows this. He understands.
Look, death, last night was my wedding. I still have the ring upon my finger. There it is, a circle of bright hair about the bone.
Shall I go, or shall I not go, every afternoon at three, any afternoon at three?
Acland understands, but on this he is quiet. He will not advise me.
Acland, please help. I am still young, and sometimes my mind is not as clear as I want it to be. I know you came to take your leave, but even so—when it is the right time, if it is the right time, will you tell me?
Jenna knew where the pain was: It was a specific ache, located between her stomach and heart, as identifiable as indigestion; she could have put her hand on it and said, “Look, there it is. That is my grief.”
On the afternoon when Gwen and Constance were visiting Maud, and the telegram was brought, Jenna sat alone in her attic room and wrote a letter. She was writing to Acland, and it was the most difficult letter she had ever had to write, because she had to tell him she was expecting his baby.
It seemed to her that there must be, should be, a very clear and simple way to explain this to him, but if there was, she could not find it. She had already begun this letter several times before, and then torn up the pages because the words would not fall the right way. Now she was three months gone; she could not delay any longer.
Still, the letter would not be written. The sentences tangled; she became hot and muddled; the nib of the pen crossed; the words crossed; she made many blots.
She wanted Acland to understand that although she had known this was likely to happen when she went with him to the hotel at Charing Cross (for she counted the days of her cycle, as she said), she had done it because she knew she had lost him, and she wanted to be left with a part of him that could never be taken away. She also wanted him to be quite clear: She did not intend to trap him; she did not expect marriage.
Two things, she said to herself, screwing up one page and beginning upon another; if she could just write those two things, it might be enough.
At once, though, her mind would fly off upon tangents. She would start doing sums; she would think of her savings—put by over a period of some twelve years—which amounted to seventy pounds. She would start to calculate how long such a sum could support a woman and a child—a woman who, once her pregnancy became obvious, would be both homeless and unemployable.
Then there was the morning sickness—she found she wanted to write about that, and how she hid herself away in the one bathroom set aside for the female servants, and ran the taps in the basin so no one should hear the sound when she was sick. She wanted to write about her skirts, and how she had let out the waistbands for the first time that week. She wanted to write about the room at the hotel, and the sad brown color of its walls; the dull look in Acland’s eyes when he had lain on the bed and watched her.
These things were not the main things; she must leave them out, but they crept back in. The ink was low in the ink pot, too thick and powdery. The paper was cheap; it snagged the tines of her pen. The room, right beneath the slates, was very hot.
In the end, she finished the letter, sealed its envelope, and wrote with great care the mysterious digits of Acland’s military address. The numbers could not be decoded, and she looked at them anxiously; she would have liked to write the name of a village, an understandable place. The numbers frightened her—so easy to put one digit out of place.
She pinned the envelope in her apron pocket. She always did this, because her great fear was that one of these letters would be dropped, and discovered. Then she crept down the back stairs. If the housekeeper saw her, she would invent a new task on the spot; if she did not, it might be possible to escape the house and post the letter at once.
Half an hour, still, before Constance was due to return, but the house was not quiet, as it usually was on such afternoons. There were doors opening and closing, footsteps, the sound of voices. Jenna went down into the kitchen, and it was there she came to understand: This letter would never be sent, for Acland was dead.
It was some while before this was clear to her. When she went into the kitchen, there was a hubbub. At the long deal table sat the cook (who was new; she had been at Park Street less than a month) and Stanley, one of the oldest of the footmen, whom Jenna had known when a child. Next to the table was a cluster of maids, eyes agog; in the midst of the maids, standing upon a stool, for he was short, was the boy employed by Maud to take messages. He was thirteen years old, and his voice was breaking. As Jenna closed the door he seemed just to have finished some momentous speech. The new cook had covered her face and her gray hair, which she set every night in curling papers, with her apron. As the boy stopped she lowered this apron. She drew herself up. She took charge. She, too, made a speech.
“Sit him down,” she said. “Let the boy sit down. Draw up the stool for him, there, between me and Stanley. That’s it. Now, Polly, fetch the lad a glass of milk. He’s had a shock, too, the same as we’ve all had. Maybe a glass of the cooking brandy, Lizzie—you’ll take one with me, Stanley, for medicinal purposes? I’ve the dinner to cook, and I don’t know as how I’ll be able, not after this. My boy Albert’s out there, too, so it’s only natural I take it hard. Just a small glass, Lizzie—well, maybe a drop or two more. I’m all o
f a jelly, so I am. Look, my hands are shaking. I ask you, how can I make them pastries, with my hands like this? You need a light hand for pastries, I’ve always said. A steady hand. There, child, you drink that up now, and then you’ll feel better. Now, start again, nice and clear. Lizzie wasn’t here the first time, and no more was Jenna. A telegram—out of the blue like that, and right in the middle of a tea party. Who’d credit it? Was he blown up, d’you think? That’s what happens, my Albert says. ’Course, they word it like that to break it nice and gentle-like, but my Albert says they’re blown up so small there’s no way they know where one man ends and another’s beginning. A man’s head would fit in a matchbox, my boy says—that’s the plain truth of it. They pick them up, when they can, but they’re no more than joints of meat. Just like a leg of lamb, my boy says. A bit of scrag end, and you don’t know but what it might be your sworn enemy or your best friend. ‘It can’t be Christian,’ I says to him, and he says, ‘Mother, so help me, that’s the way it is.’”
Jenna heard this, but she did not understand. There was a background swell of sound, too, from the maids, which was how she imagined the sound of the sea, though she had never seen the sea. Out of that murmuring there came a name, but she would not listen to it.
Then the messenger boy, refreshed by the glass of milk and perhaps sensing that his moment of glory would be brief, piped up once more. His voice pitched, sank, growled, then inched its way back up to the treble register. He was inclined to embroider now, and—seeing the rapt attention of the maids—began on a scene that he had not, in fact, witnessed.
“So,” Jenna heard, “Lady Callendar, she gives this terrible scream. Then she bent up double just like someone punched her. Then she says, ‘Oh, not Acland, not my darling Acland,’ and the Jewish gentleman, he takes her hand and tells her to be brave. He says as how he died for his country, and when he says that, she straightens up and wipes her eyes, and …”