Aunt Letitia Page 9

  Sipping her tea, she wished there was something she could do to ease Hugh’s burden, but she knew there was not. She remembered only too clearly what it was like, waiting for news in the last war. Letters from the front had been a comfort in a way but had never really removed that nagging doubt which one lived with day after day. In the time it had taken Hugh’s letters to reach England, he might have been killed a dozen times over for all she knew. Only when he’d been on leave had she been able to breathe, to relax: when he was on leave, and after he’d been wounded. Once it had become clear that he was out of danger, his leg wound had seemed like a beacon of hope. She had wanted him to get well – of course she had – but not too quickly. The longer his convalescence took, the less likelihood there was of his being shipped back to France before the peace came. Although, in the autumn of 1917, one had begun to have one’s doubts about peace. The war, it had begun to seem, would go on forever.

  Looking back, one was apt to forget that for a while it had been feared that Hugh’s leg would have to be amputated. He’d been evacuated to England, spent months in hospital, the wound refusing to heal. She remembered sitting by his bedside holding his hand while doctors held agitated conversations in whispers nearby. And then, out of the blue, remarkable progress had suddenly been made. The leg was saved, Hugh despatched from hospital, a period of rest and recuperation had begun. He had spent most of it with her at The Firs.

  She recalled with a sense of cosy nostalgia those days in early 1918 when Hugh was with her, limping along the lane to and from the village, or else sitting and reading by the fire in the parlour. He had not spoken much – not to her, anyway. But then Rupert Lambton had come home on leave and the two of them had spent much time together. Letitia remembered feeling left out. She had wondered what it was they talked about. She had been wise enough not to ask.

  It had been Rupert’s last leave.

  As he sat at his desk in Buckinghamshire preparing digests of intercepted German signals traffic, Hugh was also thinking back to his long months in hospital in 1917. Once his leg had started to heal, he had found himself with time on his hands and nothing to do but lie there and think. One thing had preoccupied him more than anything else: thoughts of Megan.

  As the pain in his leg waxed and waned, he had changed his mind about her a dozen times each day. Was she the innocent, generous-hearted girl who had given him Raggety Peg? Was she the daring, vivacious young woman he had met in London in 1912? Was she the lady of the night that the tommy in the shell hole had stolen from? He went over and over the time they had spent together and he couldn’t help wondering if he had failed her in some way. Try as he might, he could not recall how things had stood between them when they parted for the last time. It had all been swallowed up in the nightmare of those days following the sinking of Titanic. Perhaps if he hadn’t lost sight of her, perhaps if they had stayed in touch, then maybe he could have saved her from whatever life of poverty and degradation she had sunk to. He might even have married her, eventually. He had been of an age then, lying in that hospital bed, where he could marry anyone he chose; but no girl he met before or since had ever measured up to Megan.

  His drugged mind had raced ahead. He had pictured the scene, Binley Church in high summer, Megan exquisite with her red hair and white dress walking up the aisle towards him. He had laughed, buoyant on painkillers, as he imagined the expression on his aunt’s face when she realized who the bride actually was.

  But at other times, awake in the dead of night, unable to sleep in the unquiet ward, lost in a maze of pain and dark philosophy, he had wondered if he had ever really known Megan at all. Perhaps she had been walking the streets even back then, in 1912. Perhaps she had counted him amongst her clients. Was the bill still waiting to be settled? Or had he covered it with the meals, the trips, the engraved lighter?

  It had nearly driven him mad, the thoughts going round and round in his head, unable to decide where the truth lay, so many different Megans.

  After he left hospital, he had found some measure of peace. The Firs had been a place of healing, tranquil and familiar, as if he’d stepped through an enchanted door back into a world he believed had been swept away forever by the deluge of war. But even in the heart of England he had been unable to escape altogether. And as Megan receded slowly into the background of his mind once more, the war had begun to loom larger and larger. His return to the front had grown from a vague possibility to an absolute certainty.

  For a time his sense of loneliness had been crippling. He had never found it easy to express himself at the best of times, had found it impossible to talk openly to his aunt: there was nothing approaching the intimacy of their letters. But that was only to be expected. By 1918 an unbridgeable chasm had opened between the men at the front and civilians back home. The divide had always been there: them and us.

  Poring over German signals traffic in January 1941, Hugh remembered the relief he had felt when Rupert Lambton came home on leave. There had finally been someone who he could talk to, someone who would understand. Twenty-three years after their last, late-night conversation, Hugh still thought of Rupert as one of the closest friends he had ever made.

  ‘You were gone a long time,’ said Eleanor Lambton in 1918.

  ‘I was talking to Hugh Benham.’

  ‘Not … not about us?’

  ‘No, darling. Not about us. I have never told a soul about us.’

  Rupert had just slipped in through the french window and now kicked off his boots, unwound his scarf, lay down on the sofa in the blue drawing-room at the Manor. His head came to rest on his sister-in-law’s lap. He looked up, watching her as she watched the flickering flames of the fire, her face creased with anxiety. There was no other light in the room. Rupert felt safe, warmed by the fire, caressed by the shadows, caressed also by Eleanor, gently stroking his hair and temples.

  ‘Hugh is convinced he will be killed,’ Rupert said at length. ‘Whereas I am convinced that I will be spared. Fate’s greedy maw has had its fill of us Lambtons.’

  ‘Oh darling, don’t talk like that. I can’t bear to think of such things.’

  ‘I know you can’t, dearest. And I thank God that you don’t have to. For you, all this is what life is.’ He waved his hand vaguely, encompassing in his gesture the whole shadowy room with its lumpish sideboards and heavy tapestries, bulbous vases bereft of flowers, landscapes on the walls. ‘You exist in a world of cups and saucers and dressing for dinner. To me it all seems unreal. Hugh says the same. We feel like interlopers.’

  ‘But you shan’t be glad to go back, surely?’

  Rupert thought for a moment before replying. ‘In a way, I think I will. It is difficult to talk to people in Blighty. It is difficult to talk to anyone who has not experienced it, been at the front. Mother has no idea. You are the only one who even tries to understand.’ He lapsed into a brooding silence; but Eleanor’s distress was transmitted to him through the tips of her caressing fingers and he roused himself. In a lighter tone, he said, ‘Hugh has rather fallen in love.’

  Eleanor made the effort too. ‘Really? With whom? Do we know her?’

  ‘No, I don’t believe we do. She was one of the nurses at his hospital in London. Ordinarily a nurse would be beyond the pale, but there are quite a number of our sort who have taken to nursing recently. There was a duke’s daughter at the base hospital in France that time I caught one in my arm. Quite hopeless, she was. Fainted at the sight of blood, poor thing. But she felt she was doing her bit. Hugh’s nurse wants to go on nursing him even now he’s better. She is frightfully keen on him, from what he tells me. But Hugh says he won’t get married until the war is over.’

  ‘How cruel of him!’

  ‘Cruel? I would have said sensible.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s sensible at all!’

  Rupert was shocked at the vehemence in her voice. He hoped she would think it was the cold making him shiver.

  Eleanor continued, ‘If I was in her position, I wou
ld want to marry as quickly as possible, because it would be so terrible if he was … if he …’

  ‘Snatch every moment, you mean?’ Rupert reached up and took hold of Eleanor’s hand, squeezing it gently. ‘This is all so wretched for you, dearest. I’m sorry.’

  ‘But it’s worth it.’ Eleanor cradled Rupert’s head in her free hand. ‘You are worth it, darling. I could never feel that you weren’t.’

  ‘Am I?’ Rupert frowned. ‘I wonder. It would finish Mother off if she knew. And there’s no hope for us. No hope of us ever marrying, I mean, not unless the law is changed. And sometimes … well, sometimes I feel as if I have taken the place of a dead man. Taken advantage of his misfortune, I mean: because he was killed and I am lucky enough to still be alive. Don’t you ever feel the tiniest bit guilty?’

  Eleanor laid a finger on his lips. ‘No. Never. I didn’t love Julian the way I love you. I was too young and silly. And I don’t think Julian had any deep feelings for me.’ She paused, then said slowly, ‘Julian was not faithful to me. I found out. I snooped. There was a woman in London. He spent quite a lot of money on her, so I suppose he must have loved her. Of course, he would never have left me. He would never have done anything to cause a scandal. But we both knew it hadn’t worked. We weren’t suited. He only asked me to marry him because your mother wanted him to, and I only accepted because I was too much of a child to know what it really meant. It was only later that I realized what love really is. It was only when I realized I had married the wrong brother that I understood.’

  Rupert moved his head so that he could look her full in the face. ‘Who was she, this woman in London?’

  Eleanor shrugged. ‘I never found out her name. I thought you might have known.’

  ‘Lord, no! Julian was a law unto himself.’ He turned his gaze towards the fire, soothed by the light and the ceaseless movement of the flames. ‘Another woman, eh. Poor you.’

  ‘Oh darling, I didn’t mind a jot about all that! I just minded that I was in love with you and couldn’t have you.’

  ‘Do you think he ever suspected? About us, I mean?’

  Eleanor shook her head. ‘I’m certain he never did.’

  There was a long silence. At last Eleanor whispered, ‘Oh Rupert!’ and Rupert understood that this was the only way she could express all the longing, fear, and love pent up inside her.He squeezed her hand again, trying to tell her by his grip that there was no point in worrying, that they shouldn’t spoil what little time they had left. All too soon, the war would call him back. He thought of Hugh, so certain in the premonition of his own death. Hugh had been in England for months, laid up with his leg, safe from the grinding carnage in the trenches; but Rupert did not envy him. Whilst the war continued, there was only one place to be. However much one longed to be away from it all, there was no real alternative – if one wanted to be a man, that was, and not a shirker or a coward. All one’s hopes and dreams for the future had to be put away, mothballed. They would still be there at the war’s end. And until then, there were moments like this, moments to be seized with both hands.

  He sat up and took hold of her, and hoped for tonight at least everything else could be forgotten and the two of them could lose themselves in each other.

  Letitia considered her visit to Connie Lambton in April 1918 as one of the bleakest and bitterest moments of her life.

  Hugh had gone back to France. To her despair, he had proved stronger and more resilient than anyone expected. The doctors who in the previous autumn had considered amputating his leg were astounded by his recovery. Letitia had resumed her agonizing wait for news, scanning the censored newspapers for clues, listening anxiously for the sound of the postman’s footsteps on the drive, fearing the ring on the doorbell which would herald the arrival of a telegram. At sixty-eight, Letitia had felt ill-equipped to endure the long, weary months ahead; but she had had no choice. There was no alternative but to bear it, for Hugh’s sake. Sometimes it seemed incredible to her that the morose child who had arrived at The Firs sixteen years ago, a child she had never seen before and was to see only infrequently in the years that followed, could have come to mean so much to her.

  It was not long after Hugh’s departure that the dreaded telegram arrived: but not at The Firs: at the Manor.

  Poor Connie. Her youngest had been the first to go: Justin, Hugh’s contemporary at school, killed aged nineteen at Loos in 1915. Julian, the barrister, had died on the Somme in 1916. And finally came the news of Rupert’s death. He had returned to the front just in time for the great German offensive. Thus perished the last of Connie’s sons. And it looked at the time as if all their sacrifices might well have been in vain, as the German assault rolled across the Allied lines, advancing further than either side had managed since 1914.

  Connie Lambton had been shattered. It was true to say that she never recovered from this final hammer-blow of Fate. Letitia remembered the dreadful, empty silence in the blue drawing room at the Manor. Connie had aged twenty years overnight. She had looked lost as she sat there on the settee, her daughter-in-law beside her. One might have expected the girl to be of some comfort, but she had been utterly silent, gaunt and pale, as if her husband Julian had died that very week instead of years earlier. Two women, Letitia remembered thinking: two women isolated in their misery and desolation, unable to reach out to anyone. The Manor had become a mausoleum.

  That will be me, Letitia had said to herself as, after a suitable interval, she had made her excuses and left. Walking slowly back to The Firs, she had been convinced she had just had a glimpse of her own future, that sooner or later Hugh would be taken from her and she would have nothing left, her life in tatters.

  If that Letitia of April 1918 could really have seen into the future, she would have been astonished. Only a year later, the war was over, already consigned to history; and Hugh, looking fitter and healthier than she had ever seen him, was getting married at Binley Church. The day had been perfect, the sky cloudless and blue. The birds had never sung so loud, as if they were bursting with life. Letitia herself had been rejuvenated. A great weight had been lifted, and in Hugh’s smile she found recompense aplenty for all the years of torture.

  It had felt like the first spring of a whole new world.

  Cynthia Cunningham had been a VAD nurse at the London hospital where Hugh’s leg had been so slow to heal. She was a timid creature in those days, very prim and proper, with a gentle manner which Hugh at first had found soothing, and later alluring. For her part, though she was scrupulously fair and tried to treat all patients as equals, Cynthia could not disguise the fact that Hugh was her favourite.

  After he had left the hospital, Cynthia had visited him at The Firs. It had been obvious to Letitia the girl was in love with him; but whatever Hugh’s feelings – and he’d always been one to keep things close to his chest – he remained, first and foremost, a pragmatic man. He’d been honest with her, telling her that he would not consider marriage until the war had ended. It would not be right to leave a widow so young. Cynthia had accepted this with only a few tears, and had promised to wait for him.

  Over the previous years, Letitia had often wished there was someone with whom she could share all her anxieties when Hugh was at the front, someone who was as fond of Hugh as she was. Cynthia should have fitted the bill perfectly, but somehow from the first Letitia had not been able to connect with her. Cynthia remained aloof, a stranger. Letitia had wondered if this was her own fault. Perhaps, she had reasoned, it was jealousy, after so many years when she alone had been Hugh’s confidante. She had given herself a talking-to, told herself that her own feelings didn’t come into it: all that mattered was that Hugh should be happy. She had refused to admit even to herself the nagging doubts that had been there from the start about Cynthia’s suitability as a wife.

  Years later, sitting in her kitchen with Mrs Mansell and drinking tea, Letitia remembered the wedding as if it was yesterday, remembered how perfect it had seemed. But Cynthia had turned ou
t to be far from perfect.

  Oddly enough, it was that self-important assistant in the bookshop who had brought Cynthia into focus again. They shared the same supercilious manner, the same sneering tone: the author is persona non grata, she’s a pacifist….

  ‘What do you think of pacifists, Mrs Mansell?’

  ‘Pacifists? You mean conchies? Well, live and let live is what I say; but where’d we be if everyone took the same attitude? Old Adolf’d be over here quick as a flash, lording it up in Buck House.’

  ‘Some Englishmen think that’s not too bad an idea. There are people who quite admire Hitler.’

  ‘I bet none of them’s a Jew, neither.’

  ‘No, but one of them is Hugh’s wife. At least, she admired him in the Thirties. Perhaps her views have changed now.’ Sipping her tea, Letitia thought about Cynthia, whom she had not seen for many years. Cynthia then had often spoken in glowing terms of Hitler and Mussolini, admiring the trains that ran on time, the Autobahnen, the fact that Communists and Jews had been taken down a peg or two; not to mention those super rallies and marches, and that super boxer Max Schmeling who had proved the superiority of the white races over the Negroes. Had Cynthia changed her mind since? Or did she admire the rape of Czechoslovakia, the anguish of Poland, the fall of France, the bombardment of London? Were these things also ‘super’? It would be interesting to hear her explain how the so-called ‘inferior’ Jesse Owens had managed to win four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, and why Supermensch Schmeling had been defeated at the hands of Joe Louis.

  ‘A bundle of laughs she must be.’ Mrs Mansell was perched on the edge of the kitchen table with her mug held in both hands.

  ‘We never got on. I rather think she expected me to depart this mortal coil long before now, leaving my fortune, such as it is, to Hugh, and thus to her.’