Aunt Letitia Page 5

  In the silence of the kitchen, cut off from the world – her only view of the outside was the area, a mere hole in the ground – Letitia drifted back to an evening in early spring twenty-eight years before. In her mind’s eye she walked again on the narrow lawn at The Firs with Daffodil beside her. The tall trees had cast deep shadows over the garden, but up above in the sky light had still lingered. It had been a moment for whispered confidences, and Daffodil had not disappointed, revealing her pregnancy and expecting Arnold’s respectable aunt to be shocked. But Letitia had taken it in her stride. Arnold had looked happier than Letitia had ever seen him and Daffodil – scatty, excitable, Daffodil – had been congenial company. At the age of thirty-two, she had been unexpectedly naïve, as if life had barely touched her. The prospect of telling Arnold about the baby had, she freely admitted, kept her awake at night with worry.

  ‘I thought I would ask your advice. You are a kind person. I can always tell if a person is kind or not. And Arnold speaks so highly of you. But you see, I am not sure if I should tell Arnold now, or wait until after the wedding. It would seem more proper to wait. We should have waited all round.’

  Were all Americans as indiscreet as Daffodil? It was Daffodil’s openness which Letitia had found disconcerting, rather than the news of the pregnancy. After all, Arnold and Daffodil would not be the first couple whose child was conceived the wrong side of their wedding day. But to confide in a virtual stranger, as Daffodil had done, had seemed to Letitia terribly dangerous. Even then, Letitia noted as she looked back, I had grown used to keeping things close to my chest: but perhaps Daffodil had nothing to hide; perhaps she really was as innocent as she seemed.

  ‘Of course you must tell Arnold as soon as possible,’ Letitia had said in the garden at The Firs. ‘He will be delighted.’

  But had Daffodil taken her advice? There had been, what, four, five days when Daffodil could have done so, before the liner struck the iceberg and foundered in the cold, calm Atlantic. Had Arnold known about the baby? No one now would ever be able to say for certain. Arnold, his new wife and the unborn child had vanished along with the unsinkable ship, their newfound happiness cut cruelly short.

  Daffodil had been a good choice for a bride, thought Letitia, listening to her creaking bones as she moved her legs, keeping cramp at bay. She had been just what Arnold needed. Much preferable to the spoilt, caustic Cecily. Letitia had said as much in the spring of 1912, though not so directly.

  ‘Cecily was a mistake,’ Arnold had said, surprising Letitia as they talked late into the night at The Firs on the eve of his wedding: a happier occasion than the time of their last intimate chat ten years before. ‘That is not to say I disliked Cecily.’ Arnold had picked his words carefully. ‘She had admirable qualities in her way. The other chaps, my fellow officers in India, envied me. She was the perfect military wife. But I found her difficult to love. And perhaps I was not a very good husband. I was certainly not a good soldier.’

  ‘Everyone thought you perfectly suited to the army.’

  ‘I never really thought about it, not until Cecily died. I just followed the route which had been signposted for me. I joined the army because it was expected of me. It was my duty, Grandpa said.’

  ‘Yes, he would have said that.’ How often had she heard her father say, ‘Church, law and army: those are only proper professions for a gentleman.’

  ‘One had to think always of the good of the family, not what one wanted for oneself. That’s what Grandpa taught me. That is why Cecily was such a suitable wife. She was after all from one of the foremost families, rich, well connected, titled.’

  ‘Hardly good reasons for marriage.’

  ‘Marriage should be entered into for the benefits one will accrue.’

  Letitia had heard those words before, but not from Arnold. Was it then she had first begun to recognize the malign influence of her father still working from beyond the grave? Or had she always known?

  It was not the done thing – now or then – for a man to talk openly about his hopes, his dreams, his feelings; but it had been a new Arnold who had come to The Firs in 1912, an Arnold Letitia had never met before. He had been ploughing his own furrow for ten years and had grown comfortable with himself. It had taken time enough. For years, he had confessed that evening, he had considered himself a failure. He had not come up to scratch. Being unhappy with Cecily, being inept as a soldier: he had taken this as proof. He felt he had let everyone down: Hugh for one, his grandpa most of all. The Bishop had had such high hopes of him, had been so very fond of him.

  ‘But I have had time to think whilst I have been travelling, Aunt. I have put all that behind me. This time things will be different. This time I am doing things the right way, for the right reasons. I am awfully lucky to be given a second chance like this.’

  He had plans. Marriage was just the beginning. There were newfound interests he wanted to pursue. He had designs to become an archaeologist or perhaps an anthropologist. He wanted to be educated.

  ‘Properly educated, Aunt. Not that rot we get taught at school, construing Latin and playing cricket. I want to know about the world, about history and people and places. I want to know where we all come from and where we are going.’

  Such optimism, Letitia remembered as she sat in her silent kitchen in 1940. Arnold at thirty-eight had had last found his own recipe for happiness. He had a sense of purpose. But then had come the news of the sinking of Titanic, and suddenly it was all gone.

  Letitia thought of that tragedy not as an act of God or an accident of nature, but as the malevolent power of her father, as potent in death as in life, working to blot out the happiness Arnold had found for himself, just because it did not fit the established template of how things should be. Her father the bishop had thus completed the job he had started long before, ruining poor Arnold by pushing him into the army, uniting him to the inept Cecily. Arnold had wasted twenty years of his life before discovering what he really wanted, and then it proved to be too late.

  The tragedy had been Hugh’s too. He had just been discovering the father he had never known. A de facto orphan for many years, the death of Arnold had made Hugh an orphan de jure. Afterwards, Letitia and Hugh had grown closer. He was all she had, the last of her family. It had been important to keep in touch. She felt that he still needed her. Their correspondence had grown in significance as Hugh finished school and looked forward to university until, with the advent of war, all his plans had changed and he joined up instead of going up to Oxford. It was at that point that Hugh’s letters, always important, had suddenly become the only thing that mattered.

  The letters, thought Letitia: why is it so long since I thought about the letters?

  Filled with sudden urgency, Letitia levered herself to her feet, negotiated the stairs, rooted through the old armoire in one of the shut-off rooms, finally unearthing the cardboard box which held the old letters. Here they were, tied into bundles with blue ribbon: yellowing, the ink faded, but still safe and sound. Precious, precious things. Her lifeline through four long dark years.

  She picked out one and looked at the envelope. It was stamped ‘Passed by the Censor’ and addressed in Hugh’s neat hand:

  Mrs L. Warner

  The Firs

  Binley

  Warwickshire

  Holding it, looking at Hugh’s handwriting, Letitia was overcome by long-buried emotions: the constant worry, not knowing what was happening across the Channel, the fierce feeling of love for Hugh, as if its very intensity written in between the lines of her replies could deflect the German bullets and shells.

  Kneeling on the dusty carpet by the armoire with Hugh’s letters in front of her, Letitia felt herself shaking, sobbing, unable to stem the tears which slid across her wrinkled cheeks, the memories biting into her, old emotions rekindled: anxiety, grief, love, burning hatred.

  ‘You’re a silly old fool, Letitia Warner,’ she said, reaching for her handkerchief. ‘A silly old fool who has outlived her us
efulness.’

  ‘’Ere,’ said Mrs Mansell coming into the kitchen next morning as Letitia sat with her eleven o’clock coffee and the newspaper. ‘I found these on the floor in the sitting-room upstairs. What you been poking around in there for? It’s all dusty and ’orrible. Won’t do that cough of yours no good at all.’

  ‘I’ve had this cough ever since I got pleurisy and pneumonia at the age of twenty-one.’ After all these years, she put her illness down to the shock of getting married, handily reversing events and ignoring what it was that had really made her ill. ‘I don’t suppose a little dust will make much difference now.’

  ‘Yes, well, you ain’t getting any younger, are you? You should watch yourself.’ Mrs Mansell plonked a cardboard box of letters on the kitchen table. ‘What shall I do with these? Use ’em for the fire?’

  ‘Good grief no!’ Letitia folded her newspaper and put it aside. ‘These are Hugh’s letters from the last war. They have great sentimental value. That is why I have kept them all this time.’

  ‘Stone me. Ain’t one war enough for you that you want to go remembering the other?’ Mrs Mansell sat herself down and began poking through the bundles of letters. ‘Writing’s faded on most of ’em. A bit tatty too, all torn and dirty. And look at the state of this one, all messy, some sort of stain.’

  ‘Blood,’ said Letitia.

  Mrs Mansell put the envelope hastily aside. ‘I don’t know what you want to keep that one for, I’m sure. Unnerving, I’d call it. Who’s blood was it, any road?’

  ‘Hugh’s, of course. A piece of shrapnel cut his hand.’ Letitia picked up the envelope and looked at it, seeing the spot of blood, a dark brown smudge, remembering how the sight of it had shocked her at first, then made her feel somehow closer to Hugh: the flesh and blood Hugh and not Hugh the letter-writer, a detached voice. In his later letters, there had been an impersonal tone which tended to distance her from him; but the early letters had spared her nothing, as if he himself could not believe what he was seeing and needed to write it in words to convince himself it was all real. When he got used to the front, he had tended to gloss over the worst of it, but Letitia had by then become adept at reading between the lines.

  Letitia took out the letter and read aloud. Hugh had been in the reserve trenches, writing by candlelight, leaning the paper on his knee. It described the mud, the fleas, the rats, the corpses rotting in no-man’s land, the star shells which lit up the night in lurid colours. Mrs Mansell listened with her mouth open, her hands tucked in her apron pocket.

  ‘Well I never. To think such things went on.’ For once, she was at a loss. ‘I had a husband, but he never let on about anything like that.’

  ‘I think they tried to spare us the full horror of it all.’ Letitia folded the letter carefully, almost lovingly, and put it back in the box. ‘You had a husband, you said. Were you married before?’

  ‘Yes. He got killed.’ Mrs Mansell looked unusually thoughtful. ‘As I said, he never let on what it was like over there, but I think I knew, in my heart of hearts. He changed so much, see. I used to look at him. All different he was, somehow. I used to wonder what had happened to change him and what it was all for. “King and Country”, he said. “What’s the King ever done for you and me that you want to go fight for him?” I said. Then again, they said that the Germans wanted to invade us. But what would they want with our country when they’ve a perfectly good country of their own? And now it’s the same all over again. Bombing us to kingdom come. “Give ’em as good as we get”, they say. That’s all very well. But what I say is that Germans are very much like you and me when it comes down to it. At least, the ones down Sandwich Road were that I used to know. And I can’t help thinking how there’s someone like me, or someone like you, Mrs Warner – ordinary folk over there in Germany – getting bombed by our lot, and sitting in their cellars or down the tube – if they have the tube in Germany. There don’t seem no rhyme nor reason to it. I for one don’t get no satisfaction thinking of them being bombed and killed. It don’t make life any easier for us, now, does it?’

  ‘You are quite right, Mrs Mansell.’ Letitia thought it ironic that one of the very people her father had so despised – hoi polloi he had called them – should speak in terms of tolerance and forgiveness, whereas were the bishop still alive, she felt sure he would have been casting the whole German people into hellfire and eternal damnation and lauding the work of righteous British bombs in killing and maiming the enemy.

  ‘You ought to sort these out, put them in the right order.’ Mrs Mansell was still sifting through the box of letters. Her tone was conciliatory and Letitia suddenly felt that she was getting almost fond of the small but belligerent woman, notwithstanding Mrs Mansell’s tendency for avoiding the work she was paid to do.

  ‘I often thought of putting them in an album.’

  ‘That’s what you ought to have done, instead of putting ’em away in a tatty old box. Very descriptive letters, by the sound of it. Not at all like the ones my Ned used to send me. Dear Maggie, I’m in the Pink, yours, Ned. ’Cept he weren’t in the pink, not when I got his last letter. He was already dead, only I didn’t know it.’

  ‘I am sorry. It was such a terrible war.’

  ‘Ah well. All done and dusted now.’ Her thick fingers flipped the bundles back and forth, preoccupied. ‘You’ve got a soft spot for Mr Hugh, I think.’

  ‘Yes, I have. He’s the only relative I have left. And he was my saviour too, in a way. He gave me a second chance.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ Mrs Mansell held up a letter. ‘’Ere, this one’s got different handwriting from the others. Look.’

  She passed it across. Letitia looked at it. Not a letter from the front. The postmark was London, early 1915.

  ‘This was not from Hugh,’ murmured Letitia. ‘I wonder who …’ Taking out the letter and unfolding it, she looked at the unfamiliar handwriting, glanced down at the signature: yours very sincerely, Megan O’Connor.

  Of course, the girl who had stayed at the Manor that long-ago spring, the Irish girl, the one who had been such a hit with Hugh and the Lambton boys. How strange! Her name had cropped up in conversation only the other night. Surprisingly, Hugh had remembered her. A strange expression had come over his face at the mention of her name, a faraway look which Letitia had not recognized. She herself had experienced only guilt, an unexpected emotion which she had not been able to account for. Seeing this letter again after so many years, the feeling of guilt came back, even stronger than before. Other memories began to resurface with it and slowly she realized where the guilt had come from. It was because she had not answered the letter – or, at least, not until it was too late: all because of something Connie Lambton said.

  Poor Connie! One barely gave her a thought now from one year to the next.

  ‘But I was a fool to have listened to her!’ murmured Letitia. ‘I played God, deciding who was suitable and who was not when it should have been left up to Hugh. Only he had the right to decide who his friends were. I was no better than my father, riding roughshod, arranging people’s lives as I saw fit.’

  Mrs Mansell was looking at her curiously. ‘What was that you said? I didn’t quite catch …’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Letitia. ‘I was just thinking how we all like to interfere in other people’s lives.’

  ‘Like the evacuation.’

  ‘The evacuation?’ Letitia was at a loss. She did not always follow the logic behind Mrs Mansell’s thoughts.

  ‘The evacuation. That was interfering in people’s lives if anything was. And what a waste of time it was too. My two youngest, they was evacuated, but they came straight back after a month. Hated every minute. And to tell the truth, I’d rather have them home with me, bombs or no bombs, than off in some stranger’s home. They was picked and choosed like animals at a market, our Clive said. All these snooty women were going round saying, “That one’s too ugly, that one looks like it’s got fleas, that one’s not fit for anything”. That’s just
what they said. Our Clive told me. “Why don’t their mothers dress them proper, what can they be thinking”? All they wanted was cheap servants. Slave labour. There was some government plot at the bottom of it, you can be sure.’ Mrs Mansell was a great believer in government plots and secret conspiracies. ‘I mean to say, you wouldn’t dream of evacuating any child of yours, now would you, Mrs Warner?’

  ‘We didn’t have evacuations in the days when I might have had children.’

  Mrs Mansell, opening her mouth to pursue the subject, caught the look on Letitia’s face and shut it again.

  A few days later, when Mrs Mansell came into the kitchen to prepare lunch, she suddenly brought out a faded photograph from her apron pocket.

  ‘This was my Ned.’

  Letitia peered at the sepia-toned photograph, seeing a curly-haired, square-faced man staring uncertainly into the camera. ‘He was a handsome fellow.’

  ‘Get on with you! He weren’t handsome! I said as much to him myself. I said, “With your ugly mug, I won’t have to worry about no other girls chasing after you”.’

  ‘When was he killed?’

  ‘1916. Shot through the head. His captain wrote me a letter, I’ll never forget it. Such a nice letter. Said Ned died instantly, which was a blessing. He didn’t suffer, that way.’

  Letitia handed the photograph back without comment. Hugh had once written to her from the front about the letters he had to concoct to send to the families of the men who were killed. ‘We always put, “Death was instantaneous, he did not suffer in any way”. It is better for them not to know the myriad protracted and agonizing ways in which a man can die.’