The Wars

  Fire storms raged along the front. Men were exploded where they stood—blown apart by the combustion. Winds with the velocity of cyclones tore the guns from their emplacements and flung them about like toys. Horses fell with their bones on fire. Men went blind in the heat. Blood ran out of noses, ears and mouths. Wells and springs of water were plugged and stopped by the bodies of men and mules and dogs who had gone there for safety. The storms might last for hours—until the clay was baked and the earth was seared and sealed with fire.

  Rodwell and Poole had managed to shore the roof of the dugout back into place. Levitt had gone quite mad and sat with his books piled up on his knees until they touched his chin. Devlin, Bonnycastle and Roots made forays out from Wytsbrouk and one day Robert and Bonnycastle fought in confusion over who was in command of the guns. But there were no guns. They had been left in No Man’s Land. But Roots had brought them others. No. Yes. No. How many gunners were alive? There was a man called Bates. Rodwell disappeared for twenty-four hours. No one could remember where he was—or if his section had survived or perished. The rabbit, the hedgehog and the bird had died—asphyxiated in the gas attack. Rodwell had saved the toad by putting it into the drinking water pail and placing sheets of Devlin’s glass on top. It drank through its pores. The water was pure. It was a matter, Rodwell had said, of your element. The toad had a choice. Also, it only breathed about three times a minute in its winter torpor. ‘Some of us are lucky!’

  Then—on the Friday—there was silence. It was over.

  Robert went up and stood on the roof.

  It rained.

  The ground went out. It was hot to the touch for a day.

  FRIDAY, 3 MARCH

  Rodwell reappeared.

  He was being transferred.

  He said goodbye to them all and said he wanted to write a letter. He ate a can of peaches. Bonnycastle watched him but only asked for some of the juice. Rodwell let him drink from the can. They cleared the table. Paper was produced (torn from the frontispiece of Volume Three of Clausewitz). They left him sitting there alone.

  Captain Leather finally put in an appearance. ‘Uhm. Just so…’ he said as he surveyed the battlefield. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ Then he put his hands behind his back and looked the other way. Robert, Levitt, Poole and Devlin were to return to Wytsbrouk. Bonnycastle and Roots were to stay with the men. What a pity Ross had gone and lost those guns in the crater, he said to Robert—looking him straight in the face. ‘I am Ross,’ said Robert. ‘Ah yes. Well. A pity.’ Then he coughed. They all looked up and watched an aeroplane. ‘Free as a bird,’ said Captain Leather. And left them.

  ‘You’re going back,’ said Rodwell. He handed Robert his haversack. ‘These are my sketchbooks and the toad. Please release him in the mud as far behind the lines as you can get him. Preferably where there’s something green. If such a thing as green exists!’ He laughed. ‘This letter—’ (handing over a folded piece of paper)—‘Can you see that it arrives? I have no envelope. The address is inside. If you would post it, perhaps. Thank you.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Robert.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rodwell. ‘Down the line.’ He shrugged. ‘Take good care of toad. Goodbye.’

  He put out his hand.

  Robert took it.

  ‘I shall miss you,’ said Rodwell.

  ‘Yes. Goodbye.’

  The letter was addressed to: ‘My daughter, Laurine.’

  —

  ROBERT, POOLE AND LEVITT stumbled back with Devlin carrying his glass to the Battery Signals Office. There, they put Levitt on one of the flat-cars with a number of men who had been wounded. Levitt was the only one sitting up. The books were piled beside him—scorched almost beyond recognition. Certainly, they could never be read again.

  It was a clear, blue day and the air was cold as ice. You could see for miles. Robert walked beside the horse. Poole walked in front of him with the bugle bouncing against his back. It was tarnished almost black.

  Levitt said: ‘What’s to be done with us now, I wonder?’ and Devlin, walking beside him, answered: ‘We’re to rest awhile.’

  SUNDAY, 5 MARCH

  Word reached Robert Saturday that Rodwell had shot himself. Apparently he’d gone ‘down the line’ and been assigned to a company who’d been in the trenches all through the fire storms without being relieved. Some of them were madmen. This was understandable, perhaps. When Rodwell arrived, he found them slaughtering rats and mice—burning them alive in their cooking fires. Rodwell, being Rodwell, had tried to stop them. They would not be stopped—and, seeing that he took an interest, they’d forced him to watch the killing of a cat. Half an hour later, Rodwell wandered into No Man’s Land and put a bullet through his ears.

  On the Sunday, Robert sat on his bed in the old hotel at Bailleul and read what Rodwell had written.

  To my daughter, Laurine;

  Love your mother.

  Make your prayers against despair.

  I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies.

  I am your father always.

  Then his name and then an obscured address in Listowel. Robert did not even know where Listowel was. But he would find out.

  JANUARY—FEBRUARY—MARCH—1916.

  Mrs Ross began to seek out storms. That is to say, whenever there was rain or wind or snow Mrs Ross would call upstairs to Davenport and say to her: Put on your hat. We’re going out.

  Sometimes they would walk in the valley—down the long ravine with its high, treed sides and bridle path and sometimes they would walk down the streets of Rosedale. Mrs Ross would wrap herself in veils and scarves and set her hats with long and vicious pins that sometimes pierced her scalp. Walking she kept a desperate pace and Davenport was often left behind a half-a-block or more.

  Mrs Ross took pleasure in the rain and snow. She pushed her veiling back and let them beat against her face. She never spoke to anyone she met. If someone known should come along the street, she’d close her eyes and let them pass unseen. She carried a stick—(she refused to carry an umbrella)—and often struck the lamp posts as she passed. Once, when they were crossing the Sherbourne Street Bridge in a blizzard, she paused and threw her stick way out above the tree tops and watched it whirling through the snow until it disappeared. ‘There,’ she said; ‘it’s gone.’ Then she stood till her furs and veils were layered white and Mr Aylesworth stopped his motorcar to see if anything was wrong. Davenport wanted to accept his offer of a ride but Mrs Ross said no, they were going to walk to the corner of Yonge and Bloor and buy another stick at Ely’s.

  Early in February, when the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa were razed to the ground, Mrs Ross read all the accounts of the disaster in the papers—cut them out and put them in her bureau drawer. She studied them like textbooks—making notes in the margins. She believed her country was being destroyed by fire and said so to Davenport. She was also impressed by the fact that when the bells in the centre tower fell they were in the process of striking twelve o’clock—but had only tolled eleven times when they crashed to the ground. She wrote in the margin alongside this information—‘No more midnight.’ It was like a prayer.

  In March, when the wind blew down the ravine in gales, Mrs Ross put on the gardener’s rubber boots and walked in the mud. If the wind was particularly strong, she turned around and walked against it backwards all the way to the river. Davenport would follow (wearing buckled galoshes) high up out of the mud, slipping and sliding on last year’s leaves; clutching at the maple trees, tearing off branches when she fell. Sometimes she just gave up and waited, terrified of tramps, in a grove of oaks where the leaves had refused to fall—watching her friend being blown away. When Mrs Ross returned to the oaks from one of these backward hikes she would call from the bridle path: ‘Come down!’ and Davenport would emerge from her hiding place to be chastised for having failed to brave the river banks
in flood.

  On days when Mrs Ross was drunk, she sat in Rowena’s chair and Davenport would wheel her all the way to Chestnut Park and back because there were a lot of streets to cross and the bumping kept her awake. She dreaded sleep.

  Robert’s letters were read and re-read—numbered and catalogued and memorized. Mrs Ross would write him every day—long, meandering epistles angled down the pages of her blue notepaper—often (more often than not) completely indecipherable. Sometimes, only a single phrase or word could be read; ‘your father’—‘ever’—‘I have been to Cluny Drive and back’ and ‘when the robins.’

  Mr Ross would look at his wife across the table at the evening meal and never ask her what she’d done that day. Though he missed her terribly, he never complained. Many nights they ate in silence. Mr Ross, in his mind, would recreate the past and watched her as she was when they first met. He could see the very first day. She had driven round and round the park in a shiny black phaeton pulled by a spotted horse. She was wearing a brown velvet hat with yards and yards of tulle and Mr Ross had gone to stand beside the water trough, thinking she must surely stop before the afternoon was out. He was just eighteen and she was twenty-two. All her sisters had been married, but she was refusing every offer arranged. She wanted a man with very special qualities and, so far as she was concerned, this man did not exist. As every suitor arrived she became more and more intransigent. No one was going to push her around—and no one did. Then her brother died (was killed) and her father died of a broken heart. Her ambitions for independence were suddenly narrowed. Thomas Ross came into view. He was a carriage maker—shy and darkly handsome. She paused. She pondered. If she remained alone—the factory could drag her down. But marriage was dangerous. The part of marriage she mistrusted most was the part about being loved. The fact of being loved was difficult: almost intolerable. Being loved was letting others feed from your resources—all you had of life was put in jeopardy. Maybe you had to give yourself away. But young Tom Ross was persuasive in a way she could not resist. He did not ask for her. He offered her himself. In time, he was a gift she clung to. He urged her to be free.

  On that first occasion in the park she had refused to stop. The sun had risen higher and the day got hotter and hotter. Tom went on waiting—even refusing the shade of the trees. Every time she passed, he raised his hat. She thought he had the finest legs and arms she’d ever seen—but still she went on going around and around the park—never seeming to look in his direction. He thought how marvellously cruel she was—to him and to her pony—not to pause to let it drink and not to let him speak her name. Now she went round and round in his mind, fading in and out of view, still not letting him speak her name. But his love was undiminished. She was still the single-minded girl he’d won. But he feared for her, now. Across the table, she was hiding: hidden by smoke and flowers and lowered lamps. He’d smile and she would stare as if he wasn’t there. He became a portion of her silence. He was just another room through which she passed towards the dark.

  WEDNESDAY—8 MARCH

  Robert was being sent to ‘Blighty.’ His present tour of duty was over. He sat on the train. One of Rodwell’s sketchbooks was open on his lap. There was the toad. Quite, as Rodwell had promised, realistic—lacking entirely any sentimental nuance. Just a plain, bad-tempered grumpy toad. Robert smiled. He leafed through the pages. There were birds and mice. The rabbit and the hedgehog. More toads. A frog and some insects. Then, towards the back of the book, he found himself. ‘Robert.’ He was lying asleep by the candelight in the dugout. His mouth was slightly open. One hand reposed on his breast. He was wearing Harris’s bitten gloves. The other hand hung down towards the earth. The likeness was good. Unnerving. But the shading was not quite human. There was another quality—speckled and fading into brightness where his clothes touched his neck and cheek. Robert could not decipher what that quality was—until he’d finished leafing through the book and glanced through the others (there were five, all told). In all of them—on every page, the drawings were of animals. Of maybe a hundred sketches, Robert’s was the only human form. Modified and mutated—he was one with the others.

  What had Rodwell meant by this? Or was it just the way he drew?

  —

  EARLY THAT MORNING, Robert had released the toad beneath a hedge. Here, there was at least the promise of green. The toad at once had begun to burrow into the welcome mud. It threw the dirt in all directions—making a nest for itself until its eyes were all that could be seen. And the hump of its spotted back. Robert reached down. He touched it with his fingertips. ‘Be well,’ he said. And left it there.

  Four

  Access to the details of the affair between Robert Ross and Barbara d’Orsey was gained as the result of a second meeting with Lady Juliet d’Orsey in London at number 15, Wilton Place. The interview was given on a weekend redolent with English rain and potted hyacinths and the ever-present freesia on the mantelpiece. There is sometimes thunder on these tapes and one of them records, in the background, the progress of a wedding that took place across the road on the morning of the Saturday. On the Sunday the windows were tightly closed and the drapes were drawn against the noise of the storms and nothing was heard from St Paul’s, Knightsbridge till Evensong when the drapes were opened and the sunlight and the singing poured across the terrace. Downstairs in the Ministry of Scientific Information everyone had mercifully departed for the suburbs and South Ken—leaving the premises vacant. Their telephones rang from time to time and the sound of the watchman’s footsteps can be heard, but that is all.

  There is an aspect of this interview which, alas, cannot survive transition onto paper—and that is the sound of Lady Juliet’s voice. As already stated, she is now in her seventies and a very large portion of her diet consists of gin and cigarettes. The voice, at times, sails off in what can only be described as song and its resonance causes the crystals dangling from the chandeliers to vibrate. The voice then quavers—cracks and is reduced to a helpless whisper. The effect of this singing in the passages where Lady Juliet reads from the diaries she wrote when she was twelve years old is both magical and devastating—for you know that what you hear is the voice of someone near to death—and the wisdom remains a child’s. Lady Juliet herself is not aware of this apparent contradiction. You know that by the intensity with which she reads. To her—the voice is just the voice of her mind and consistent with the sound of thought. Turning the pages, there is no amazement of discovery on her face. Only the delight of verification. It might be interesting to note that she read with great rapidity and that when she paused to comment—(her comments will appear in italics)—she inevitably used the pauses as an interlude for gin. At one point she raised her cup and in the accent of an actress born to play Eliza Doolittle she said: ‘gin was mother’s-milk to her’ and grinned.

  Stourbridge St Aubyn’s, where the incidents which Lady Juliet’s diary describes took place, is a village about seventeen miles from Cambridge on the river Stour. This river rises in Cambridgeshire and empties into the North Sea at Harwich. For most of its journey, it constitutes the border between Essex and the Suffolks. The countryside is among the most beautiful in the world—being flat and made up of those lush green fields and winding streams—hedges, spires and woods of dappled beech and oak that define the word ‘English.’ Spring, in this region, has no equal anywhere. The fields are filled with black and white cows—the riverbanks are spread with yellow flowers—larks fly up in endless song—and the rain, when it falls, is soft and warm. Here are towns with names like Camden Lights and Grantchester—roads that wind past canals and over bridges—whirl you round a hundred village greens, scattering geese and waving at children—whip you past the naked swimmers in the ponds and deposit you at inn yards where the smell of ale and apples makes you drunk before you’ve passed the gate. It is an old world—comforting and safe; defined by centuries of slow motion.

  St Aubyn’s itself is an abbey and has been the family seat of the d’Orseys si
nce the year 1070, when it was consigned to the founder of their line by William the Conqueror. The abbey has long since fallen into ruin, but the house—begun in Jacobean times—has grown in size and been consolidated by each succeeding generation. It sits in the middle of a park, surrounded by lawns, and in the mornings (up until the time of Lady Juliet’s childhood, at any rate) deer would come out of the nearby forest and wander through the flower beds eating the lilies planted there in honour of the d’Orsey’s origins as burghers of Rouen.

  At the time Robert Ross first met the d’Orsey family, all five of its members of his own generation still survived. Their father, the Marquis of St Aubyn’s, lived in London at Wilton Place. He loathed the country. He loathed his children. He probably loathed his wife. Juliet barely remembered him. The salient fact of his existence, so far as she was concerned, was his funeral. This she remembers vividly, because at the time he died she was his sole remaining heir and it was left to her to get him underground. In her own words: ‘I took advantage I’m afraid, and gave myself the pleasure of the loveliest Mass you can imagine! The poor dreaded man would never have forgiven me, of course—but you have to understand what it means to be able to order a Mass and I knew I’d never have the opportunity again—and certainly I’d never hear my own—so I gave him “the works” as they say and it’s lasted me all these years. Oh! I had bits of Monteverdi—Mozart—Bach all jumbled up. It was glorious. A gourmet’s hash of music. Do you know—it made all the hell he’d put me through worth it? I mean the hell of his absence.’ He died in 1952 when Juliet was forty-eight years old. She had then not seen him for so long she didn’t recognize his corpse.