‘Oh, it’s terribly easy,’ said Christabel. ‘When it all begins to look obvious, we go to northern France to make pictures of the battlefields as they are now, and when we come back, lo and behold, we have ample material for a new exhibition, and have adopted an abandoned child that was found at dawn on the steps of a church in Bernières-sur-Mer by a priest. And we shall be roundly praised.’
Daniel’s feeling of panic did not subside. ‘I’m not convinced I could manage anything. And how do you expect me to father children and just walk away from them? Leave them to somebody else? You know how much I adore Esther and Bertie. What you’re asking is impossible. You haven’t thought of me at all.’
‘We have thought of you, darling,’ said Gaskell. ‘We know what an awful sacrifice it would be for you, and we’re only asking you because we love you and have no alternative, and we hope that you love us enough to make the sacrifice. Christabel only wants to give herself to someone she loves, and the only man she loves quite enough is you. And we would ask you to be their godfather, and come here as much as you possibly can, and we’d send them to stay with you and Rosie whenever practical.’
‘Them?’ said Daniel. ‘There’ll be more than one?’
‘We’d like at least three,’ said Gaskell.
Christabel added, ‘And you’d have to swear an inviolable oath of eternal secrecy. For the children’s sake.’
‘And what about your parents? What happens to them whilst you’re away?’
‘We’ve got Dunston, and the other two, and we’ll hire in a nurse,’ said Gaskell.
Daniel sat silent for a while, and then said, ‘Do you have any idea what you’re asking of me? I really don’t think I can father a child and just abandon it. I’m afraid the answer must be no.’
‘Please think about it. For as long as you like,’ said Christabel, leaning forward in her seat.
‘I’ve thought about it, and the answer is no.’
Christabel and Gaskell fell very quiet, and Daniel began to find guilt replacing the anxiety that had been making him sensible. He had to sit there dumbly whilst both women hung their heads and wept silently into their hands. He felt he could do nothing but leave the room and prepare for bed, muttering ‘I am very sorry’ as he turned at the door. He walked up the wide staircase with a heavy heart.
He spent some time in the bath, mulling the whole strange scene over, listening to the nightingale in the redwood, and imagining what it would be like to make love with Christabel, or even Gaskell. He had been led astray by his loins quite often enough, in his own estimation, and he began to think sadly of Samadara, and what it would have been like to have abandoned Rosie and begun again with her. They would have had Eurasian children who were neither one thing nor another, and that would have been difficult for them. And what would have become of Bertie and Esther? But there is certainly nothing in life more wonderful than to have children, of that he was certain. The prospect of more of them filled him slowly with excitement.
When the water had cooled and he saw that his hands and feet were becoming white and puckered, he got out of the bath, dried himself, and put on his pyjamas and dressing gown.
He walked thoughtfully down the corridor, and turned the handle of his door. He had not gone two steps into the room before he realised that the room was filled with yellow candlelight, and that Christabel was in his bed, in a lacy nightdress, with a small blue bow at each shoulder. Her heavy golden hair, released, was spread across the pillow, and she was biting her lip, looking up at him with her blue, supplicating eyes. She sat up suddenly and held her arms out to him.
He realised that he was about to have no choice but to surrender his common sense. He remembered something that Dr Iannis had said to him on the boat. ‘In Greece we think it very bad manner to refuse woman. This is philotimo, this is the Greek Way.’
Daniel stood for a moment, and said, ‘I’m not promising anything.’
‘But I am,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea how much I’ve been hoping. How much I’ve been looking forward. How much I’m going to do my best.’
He raised the cover and slid into the bed beside her. She leaned over him, and he felt her hot breath on his face. She put her hand through the gap between his buttons, and lightly stroked his chest. He felt the tingle running down to his feet and back up his spine to his neck. She snuggled up to him, laid her head on his shoulder and laughed softly, saying, ‘You’re such a darling.’ She laid the side of her knee across his thigh, and propped herself up on one elbow. She looked into his eyes, and kissed him lightly on the lips. She pulled back for a second and said, ‘You know this isn’t just about children, don’t you?’
24
Young Edward
I am leaving ’cause I have nothing very much to hold me here any more.
I owed everything to the McCosh family.
I was one of the first two to be knocked down by a car in Court Road. That’s quite a distinction, isn’t it? Or ‘innit’ as I used to say before I got taken on by Mr McCosh. We kids were playing British Bulldog when this drunk in an AC Six mowed us down and I got pinned to the wall. We were only little kids, and my mate Freddie got killed because he smacked his head on the wall and it caved his skull right in. Crushed it like an egg. You could see the bones and the brains.
I got me legs smashed and it was Miss Rosie and Miss Ottilie who came out of the house and did the first aid, and thank God they’d been VADs in the war, because whatever they did, they must have done it right. And then Captain Pitt came out and thumped that bastard drunk in the nose, and kicked him over, and he would have killed him if that copper hadn’t turned up.
As it turned out, Mr Hamilton McCosh paid for my hospital treatment and then he paid for my education, which is why I am somewhat good with my letters these days, because before I could only just about write my name. And he tried to keep that all secret from my mum. And then when I could walk a bit, he said, ‘You’re going to be a caddie, and that’ll get your legs working, laddie’ and I thought, ‘Blimey, he talks in rhymes,’ and he got me work at the Royal Blackheath, which is, so they say, the oldest golf club in the world, been going since King James the First, and what is still more stuffed with Scotch than English, like the one at Wimbledon, and to be honest it’s more like a drinking club than a golf one. Straight up. They have these massive binges they call ‘Wee dinners’ after the trophies.
That’s how I got so good at golf, starting off as a caddie, and mainly living off the tips from those Scotch blokes. Mind you, I always handed most of it to me mum. I wasn’t full-grown, and Mr Hamilton McCosh gave me a set of cut-downs. I loved them clubs. I had a driver and a spoon, and a mashie, and a mashie niblick, and a niblick and a putter, all different makes, and that’s all. I still use that putter. I grafted an extension on it when it got too short. It’s got a slope on the back so you can get out of awkward lies under a bush by playing left-handed, and that way you don’t lose a stroke. That was a tip from Mr McCosh. He said, ‘Always have a left-hander in your bag, laddie.’
In the end I was winning all the artisans’ and caddies’ matches, despite my poor old legs, and I started winning a few bob here and there, and to tell the truth, I was thinking of leaving anyway. I mean, it’s a lovely course, but it’s not much of a challenge, is it? It’s parkland. It’s not hilly and it’s not exactly a links, and I know that Mr Braid designed it, but there’s not much you can do when you haven’t got the space and the roly-poly, is there?
Mr Braid came to see how his course was getting on, and he brought Mr Vardon with him, and it was like as if two heroes had turned up, the way they got greeted and treated. Well, I had the honour to play a round with them, and they were very complimentary, and it was after Mr Vardon had got TB, and it messed up his putting because of the nerve damage, so he got the yips on the short putts, and he and Mr Braid put a guinea on the match, and believe it or not they finished
on exactly the same score, so they took a guinea each and gave it to me, and I was only three strokes behind them. I don’t know how Mr Vardon managed to play, with a smoking pipe stuck in his gob like that all the time, coughing and wheezing like a steam train. Mr Braid gave me his address and said he thought he knew a club up north that needed a professional, and that in his opinion I was the man, and he was prepared to give me a recommendation.
I said I’d have to talk it over with Mr McCosh.
I was going to do it after the Bombay Medal. That’s the one before the last Wee Dinner, and that’s really a bloody great binge, excuse my French. I didn’t get the chance, though.
Mr Hamilton McCosh wasn’t very well. It was his heart. He didn’t often do more than nine holes, and he reckoned he was going to invent an electric cart for fatties and old buggers like him, but there weren’t batteries light enough for that kind of thing unless you wanted to go round in a milk float. That’s what he said.
But he was determined to win that Bombay Medal. It was the medal sent by the Bombay lot when their club was founded. That was 1843, and they were all Scotch ’n’ all, with ginger bollocks. Mr McCosh said this was his last tournament, and then he was going to hang up his clubs, meaning he was going to pass them on to me, and then he was going to go home and take to his bed and die of sadness. I said ‘You’ll live forever, sir’ and I was honestly hoping he would, because I loved that man, and no one in my whole life did me more favours than he did. I reckon maybe it was because he didn’t have any sons. He would’ve liked a son or two to play golf with.
Well, Mr Hamilton McCosh never got to go to bed and die of sadness. He died of blooming happiness. On the sixteenth hole. It’s a par three with a great big green, and even if you get on in one, you might well do three putts.
Anyway, he was very tired and breathless by then, and I handed him that mashie of his that he loved so much, and his idea was to lay the ball up at the front of the green. He took a nice slow backswing, and brought that club down hard and smooth, and he followed through just like J. H. Taylor. That ball made a beautiful arc and it rolled straight and true, and it ran for the flag, and it hit the pole and skipped up in the air, and then it popped back down into that little hole.
Mr McCosh did a dance on the tee, whooping and raising his arms, and stamping and cavorting, and then he handed me the mashie and he actually ran to the green, and we saw him fall on his knees and bend down to look at that little ball in the hole, and he looked like he was praying, and then suddenly he jerked a bit and fell sideways.
By the time I got there he was all but gone. I was kneeling over him and his lips were blue, and his face had a terrible paleness, and he had his right hand over his chest, and I rolled him onto his back, and he was gasping for breath, and he opened his eyes and raised his right hand, like it was a blessing, and said ‘Dinna fash, Edward laddie’ and then his eyes rolled back, and that was him dead as a doornail on the green of the sixteenth on a beautiful day. I do hope I go like that.
We got Dr Scott, who was on the eighteenth, and Captain Pitt, who was on the twelfth, but Mr McCosh was well and truly gone. Captain Pitt gave me his clubs and set off at a run for the house in Court Road. He was that kind of a bloke, a bit of an athlete.
Mr McCosh is buried up against the wall at St John’s. Everybody came, even Mr Ives the grocer, and Oily Wragge the gardener, and all the old Scotch drunks at the golf club, and quite a few women in black who nobody knew who they were, and I’m going to put a big bunch of flowers on his grave before I go up north, because I took that job that Mr Braid came up with, and I’m taking my mum because Dad was a wheelwright what got killed in the Horse Artillery, and my little sister died in the influenza, and I can’t leave my mum on her own, can I? And when I get there, up north, I’ve got high hopes of finding a lass who wants to settle down.
My mum reckons she can take in washing wherever she is, but I say, ‘Mum, I’m a professional now, you don’t have to take in another set of long johns as long as you live,’ and she says, ‘But I can’t do nothing, can I?’
So there you are. Mr Hamilton McCosh has died of happiness, and I’m off now, and I’m a professional.
The funny thing is, that AC Six what ran me down ended up belonging to Mr McCosh, because the owner never did come back to get it, so I saw it quite often, and every time I did, I felt that ruddy great pain in my leg bones all over again. Still, it was a lucky accident for me, wasn’t it?
I owe everything to Mr Hamilton McCosh. And that bleedin’ AC Six, I suppose.
I really loved that man.
25
Rosie (2)
I brought us home because in the end I couldn’t bear to be apart from my father when I knew he had hardly any time left to live. I did love it in Ceylon, but somehow it wasn’t really me. Nuwara Eliya was like England, in fact they called it ‘Little England’, but it was terribly exaggerated beyond Englishness, like when an artist uses too strong a shade of blue for the sea, when the sea is actually green. And I hated having to go to the Hill Club. They didn’t allow lady members, and to get to the ladies’ entrance we had to step over an open gulley, go through a nasty little alley, and then we were confined to one end of the clubhouse. And despite being treated like that we were expected to go there! It was almost compulsory. Compulsory humiliation!
The races were fun, but you didn’t go to watch the racing, you went to see who was wearing what kind of hat. I went to support Hugh, really. The best thing was going to that beautiful post office that was rather like a cake, to see if anyone had written or sent a parcel. And try as I might, I never learned to love playing golf, as Daddy did. Daniel thought it was a lovely course.
I adored the servants, but it was like having three grown-up children, always squabbling and coming to me for adjudication, and doing strange things like buying a pot of orange paint with their own money, and painting the stuffed monkey in the hallway because they thought it would make it prettier, and leaving orange splashes on the parquet.
And it was entirely annoying trying to be helpful to the natives, and them just putting up with it, as if I were some tedious old lady who had to be mollified. I think they were pleased about the improvements to their accommodation, but they didn’t come near the clinic unless they were at the point of death. It was so frustrating waiting for someone to appear, with all your medicines lined up and instruments carefully sterilised, knowing that they were out there somewhere suffering away for nothing, and depending on numerology and astrology and strange concoctions.
Every day was the same. Daniel was out at dawn, and often not home until long after dark. He’d taken to the native food and his breath was not at all pleasant. He was always bad-tempered with me because I didn’t want to have any more children and he wouldn’t accept what the obvious way not to have them was. He said there were alternative ways of ‘having fun’ as he put it, but it’s a sin if it’s only done for fun, everyone knows that, and it’s not as if I am a lady of the night who exists for just one purpose. In any case, we had had several years of ‘fun’, and it had begun to pall on me, as most pleasures eventually do. I couldn’t see why he didn’t want to settle for being good companions. I spent all my time supervising the servants and making lists, and I didn’t even have very much time with Esther and Bertie, because the ayah was always there, and I couldn’t leave her with nothing to do.
Every Sunday we played tennis after church. Every Sunday exactly the same, and jolly good fun, but always the same, with Daniel always winning the men’s and me always coming second to Gloria Bassett in the women’s, and then Daniel and I always beating Hugh and Gloria in the mixed doubles.
Sometimes the men would disappear for a week, to go duck or snipe shooting, and I’d be sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper wondering why I couldn’t write poetry any more. Once I went to Colombo with Gloria on that magnificent train journey, and we spent the whole week go
ing to tea with people and then out for drinks, and getting much too hot and uncomfortable, and going for walks on the promenade, and taking a hansom to Mount Lavinia, and talking sociable nonsense. I went to Cave’s and came back with a big parcel of books that just made me feel even more cut off, because I was wondering what was really happening in London with all the new poets and the new kind of poetry that was being written. I bought Mary Webb’s poetry, and there was one lovely poem in it called ‘The Lad Out There’ which came to mean a great deal to me. ‘Ah, powers of love…’
Daniel was furious when I started demanding to go home. One night he went out into the garden and was so angry and frustrated that he stood roaring across the valley like a mad wild beast. Sometimes I almost feared he was going to hit me. I knew he wanted to, but he was too much of a gentleman. He kicked the table over and took a chair and hurled it down the hillside instead. It reminded me of when Archie threw away his elephant gun. Daniel really did love it in Ceylon. He loved his workers and his mountains and his huge machinery, and his expeditions up Adam’s Peak the hard way with Hugh Bassett. I also think he was a little dissatisfied, because producing tea can never be as important as helping to win a war. He should have stayed in the RAF, really. He loved his motorcycle, but it wasn’t an aeroplane.
I spoiled everything for him when I forced him to come home. I know it.
I told him that Esther and Bertie should be properly educated at home, but, if I am honest, I knew they would do just as well in Ceylon. They have schools that are more British than the British ones. I said it just to add weight to my case. I sometimes criticise myself for this kind of thing, because it is a form of lying, and I wonder if there will ever be a time when I live up to my own ideals and truly become the sort of person that I think I really am. I fear that one can only know oneself properly in the painful light of retrospection. That’s when I begin to despise myself.