Ashenden (31 page)

That, at least, did not surprise him. Amanda’s mother, in some shape or form, lurked at the bottom of nine-tenths of their disagreements. Which was odd, considering how she had featured so largely in his wife’s decision to give wedded life a go.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but your mother has never shown the slightest interest in contributing to our household expenses.”

“She simply wants the best for her only grandchild.”

Ferrars shook his head. “Well, she’s gone too far this time. I’ll ring her tomorrow and tell her so. And I’ll ring the school, whatever it’s called, and tell them there’s been a mistake.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Amanda, “if you care about your daughter.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The coming months are going to be difficult. She will need to be somewhere safe and settled.”

“I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized that you and your mother were on speaking terms with Herr Hitler. We don’t know when this bloody war will start. We don’t even know if there’ll be a war.”

“I’m not talking about war,” said Amanda. She put down her sewing. “I had been planning to wait until after Christmas to tell you, but as you’re being so frightfully unreasonable, you might as well know now that I’m leaving you.”

You could dread something happening, expect it, wait for it, and still feel the shock when the chasm opens up under your feet. His mouth was dry.

“You’re leaving me.”

“Don’t beg me to stay, please. That really would be the limit.”

“And what do you propose to do? Once you’ve left.”

“I intend to get a divorce.”

“I see,” said Ferrars. “Then I’ll fight you for custody.”

“You won’t get it.”

“Have you seen a lawyer?”

Amanda brought her penciled eyebrows together in a little frown. “Of course. You haven’t a leg to stand on.”

He was not taken in by the evenness of her tone or by her unnatural composure, in itself a form of exaggeration. This was still a scene played out to the back rows of the stalls.

“What do you mean by that?”

She picked up her sewing again and made a couple of swift, stabbing stitches.

“I said, what do you mean by that?”

She raised her eyes and played her card. “Edie Baxter.”

“Who?”

His heart was hammering and he could feel some sort of foolish expression occupy his face.

“You heard me. Not a name, I admit, previously familiar to me from our small circle of acquaintance.”

That was the moment Ferrars knew it was over. Edie Baxter had been a stupid lapse—a moment of temptation or weakness, call it what you like—and the devil of a job to get disentangled from.

“How did you find out?”

“You’re a poor liar, George, which I count as one of your better qualities.”

“It meant nothing.”

“Not to
Edie,
it seems,” said Amanda, handling the name in the tongs of quotation marks. “If you must know, she rang me after you finished with her. Went into a great deal of rather unpleasant detail. I don’t know what you promised, but the stupid bitch was jolly disappointed not to get it. Hell hath no fury, et cetera. She’s happy to make a statement if necessary. Spill the beans, as the Yanks say. But of course one would hope to keep matters civilized for Dinah’s sake.”

Ferrars threw his whisky glass across the room. Then he hurled the ashtray after it. For good measure, he knocked over the lamp. The bulb shattered.

“For God’s sake, George, act your age.”

“Is Mummy paying for this too?”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake the child,” said Amanda.

He went over to the window, parted the curtains, and tilted his forehead against the cold glass, panting.

Behind him, he was aware of her tidying up, rustling the packaging in which the school clothes had arrived, coming and going between bedroom and sitting room, heels tapping on the floor.

*  *  *

It was a beautiful day for a drive to the country, clear and crisp. For the Lyells, newly married, every outing no matter how ordinary was weighted with significance. The war, with its threat of separation
or worse, loomed over their future. In defiance of it, they were nest building.

“I thought we might take the roadster since it’s fine,” said Hugo.

“Yes, why not?” said his wife, Reggie.

“You won’t be too cold?”

“A little fresh air never hurt anybody. And after last night it would be good to clear one’s head.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

Hugo watched his wife wrap her dark-brown hair in a head scarf. Perhaps there would come a time when he no longer noticed the grace she gave to an ordinary gesture, but he couldn’t imagine it.

The previous evening had been frightful. Old friends of his family, who lived in Belgrave Square, had invited them to dinner. As soon as the drinks were poured, and tongues loosened, Hugo regretted accepting the invitation. It wasn’t so much the friends as the friends of the friends.

“Anything rather than war” was not an uncommon sentiment after Munich. You heard it and read it often enough these days. What had been aired around the lamplit room, however, had strayed into open admiration of the German regime. It disgusted him. So did the remark someone had made that if you hadn’t fought in the last one, you couldn’t possibly know what you were talking about. He thought of Max Koenig, a professor of mathematics, who had arrived from Göttingen the previous month on the boat train with his wife and two daughters, all that remained of twenty-five years of research and domestic life crammed into four small suitcases. Max and Hugo’s elder brother, Paul, who was killed in the war, had been great friends at university. Honoring that bond, Hugo’s father had helped the Koenigs get out, found them a tiny flat in West Hampstead, and was paying the rent until the professor could find work. “They froze his bank accounts and confiscated his wife’s pearls and engagement ring,” his father had said, adding that when he’d shown them the flat, with its shared bathroom down the hall, the wife, Maus, had cried like a child.

In the hall of their tall, narrow house in London, Hugo patted his pockets.

“The keys are in the dish.”

“So they are.”

“What’s the name of this place we’re going to?” said Reggie, as he held the door open for her.

“Ashenden Park.”

*  *  *

The first time Hugo saw Reggie, she was on horseback. A college friend had asked him to Leicestershire for the weekend, and they’d gone along to a point-to-point for the want of anything better to do between lunch and dinner. Hugo didn’t ride himself, or at least not well enough for the daunting fences and hedges, and was standing with the other mud-flecked spectators at the halfway mark when a horse and rider flew past and cleared an enormous ditch as if it were a crack in the pavement. His immediate companion, an elderly woman in tweeds with rheumy eyes, noted his astonishment and passed him a hip flask. It was a chill, overcast day, threatening rain.

“Who was that?”

“Oh, that was Reggie.”

He shook his head. The name meant nothing.

“Regina Fitzalan. Daughter of Patrick Fitzalan, the trainer.”

“I don’t know the racing world very well.”

“Patrick hasn’t had a winner for a while. Through no fault of his, I might add. He’s a superb horseman.” The Fitzalans had a yard near Kilkenny, the woman went on to explain. “Poor as church mice, of course.”

Later he would understand just how short money had been and how much that had contributed to the independence and resourcefulness of Reggie’s character. At the time, as incredible as it was to him now, he had thought nothing more about her until that evening, when he was standing with his college friend in the drawing room before dinner.

“Reggie!” said his friend, waving. “Over here.”

Hugo hadn’t recognized her out of her riding clothes. She came across the room and his heart swerved in his chest.

They were introduced, they talked, and when he complimented her on her riding, she said that he should see her father in action. “No,” she replied in answer to his next question, “he didn’t really school any of us. His approach is pretty much to tell you not to fall off. And then to tell you to get back on when you do.” There was a quality to her voice he found irresistible, not so much an accent but a different sort of music.

His previous affairs had been acquisitions. He would see someone he wanted, get her, more often than not, and then stop wanting her after a while. This had nothing to do with the inequality of possession. This was like finding a part of yourself that you hadn’t known was missing and having it restored to you.

*  *  *

An hour after the Lyells left London, they were driving along the narrow lanes that twisted through the Chilterns, up and down one green hill after another. While the white roadster was a plaything and a thoroughly impractical color, Hugo had to admit it cut a dash. As they came through the village, children ran after them, waving and calling. They passed a church, a couple of pubs, and a war memorial, and he began to laugh.

“What is it?”

“I was remembering that dreadful woman last night who thought your dress was by Worth. The look she gave you when you said you’d made it yourself.”

“She was shocked, wasn’t she? You know, she came up to me afterwards and asked whether you gave me a decent allowance, and that if you didn’t, it was a scandal considering how well-to-do you are.”

“I hope you sent her away with a flea in her ear.”

“Well, I told her I liked making things and that she had a good eye because Worth have used the same cloth themselves.”

Hugo smiled to himself. One of the things he cherished most about Reggie was her generosity of spirit.

“I think this should be the turning,” he said.

The trees thinned out, revealing a house set in open parkland.

“How beautiful,” said Reggie, as they came up the drive.

The late-morning sun brought out the honey color of the stonework, and the great house seemed to glow. Something about it tugged at her, stirred her imagination in a way she could not put into words.

“Most of the house is shut up, apparently,” said Hugo. “We’re to go through that courtyard over there and ring the bell.”

As they stood waiting on the doorstep of the pavilion, they could hear music coming from above.

“What is that insinuating tune?” said Hugo.

“ ‘Love in Bloom,’ ” said Reggie, and they laughed.

*  *  *

Ferrars had stored the garden furniture, statuary, and stone urns in one of the outbuildings beyond the kitchen garden. As he switched on the light, a bare bulb festooned in cobwebs, he realized that he ought to have tidied up a bit: the place was a jumble. But after Amanda’s announcement the previous night, and the amount of whisky he had put away afterwards, he was in no mood.

It did not help that the couple—the Lyells—were a handsome pair. To rub salt further into the wound, they were obviously smitten with each other. The woman was young, graceful, and beautiful. The man was a little older and, judging by appearances, well-heeled, and he envied him on all accounts: wife, wealth, and tailoring. Careless of their expensive clothing, they were crouching down examining a pair of urns with snarling lions carved on the front, discussing whether or not they were too big.

“We live in London,” said Reggie, smiling up at him. “Our garden is tiny.”

Hugo stood up. “Do you deliver?”

“I could arrange transport,” said Ferrars. By which he meant that he could borrow a van and drive the urns to London himself.

“And how much are you asking for them?”

“Six guineas.” Ferrars had been intending to sell them for four, but he was feeling savage. “They’re eighteenth-century. Original to the house.”

“We’ll take them.” Hugo got out his notecase, then hesitated a moment. “If you don’t you mind my asking, how long have you been here?”

“A good while,” said Ferrars. “Why?”

“There’s something awfully familiar about this place. I seem to remember some sort of party.”

The treasure hunt, thought Ferrars, with a further sink of spirits. What a hiding to nothing that had been.

“I don’t know how one could ever forget a house like this, darling,” said Reggie. She wouldn’t forget it, she knew.

“Well, it must have been nine, ten years ago.”

Ferrars shook his head. “Before my time.” He ushered them from the outbuilding and snapped off the light.

B
lackout. For six years every factory, home, and institution in the country has done its bit for the war effort and the house is no exception. While you might think it’s risen to the occasion, it’s had no choice in the matter. Its requisitioned rooms, to which only ghosts of glamour still cling, fill up with filing cabinets and uniformed personnel; its staircases echo to the pounding tread of regulation boots. Tape crisscrosses the windows, tanks tear up the turf, and planes drone monotonously overhead. Troops training for invasion invade the park.

Now nights are no longer broken by the crump of falling bombs or the wail of sirens. But the war isn’t over for everyone.

*  *  *

In his dreams Walter Beckmann sometimes saw the house from above. He did not know what trick of the imagination allowed it to appear to him from this perspective—he had never flown in a plane—and yet the positioning of the house on the hill, the distribution of its chimneys on the roof, the crisp shadow it cast over the park were accurate so far as he could tell. Such soaring, billowing visions often came towards morning, which is why he remembered them. Unremembered were deeper, darker, more fragmented ones.

When the war ended, they had expected to be shipped home in a few months. Instead repatriation was slow, and out of eighty beds
in the hut only twenty-three were empty. There was a rumor that the new German government would pay a mark a day in compensation for those who remained in the camps after the turn of the year. He wondered whether it would mean that Vogel, who had given the
Heil Hitler!
salute when he’d been summoned for his interview before the panel, and sentenced to a further six months as a result, would be rewarded for his loyalty to National Socialism at the same time he was punished for it.