Softly Grow the Poppies (32 page)

The maidservants were invited to inspect the servants’ quarters where, to their delight, they were all to have a room each and with great enthusiasm they began to pack their belongings in preparation for the move.

Beechworth, which had had more money spent on it in the past than Summer Place, had a bigger, more modern kitchen so Lady Summers with Dolly, Nessie and Mrs Philips having their say, began to put into place her plans for a brand-new, up-to-date kitchen at Summer Place.

Everyone was happy, except Will!

He stood with his rosy mouth hanging open when he was told that in future everyone would live at Summer Place. It was not that he disliked the Beechworth servants, he said, but he and Tim had built a tree-house on the edge of the wood nearest to Beechworth and they had all their treasures there. And anyway, where
was
Tim? Will hadn’t seen him for weeks, exaggerating as children do, and he demanded to be told where his friend was. He and Charlie had good times, eyeing his own father with a disdainful, airy look, but Tim was his bestest friend and wherever was he, implying that he believed they had hidden him away somewhere.

‘You can’t let someone else live at Beechworth, Harry,’ he said patiently.

He glared round at the circle of grown-ups as if he couldn’t believe their stupidity. He stamped his foot and Dolly put her hand to her mouth in distress. Nessie, Rose, Harry and Charlie stood or sat about the kitchen, which already had signs that a move was to be made. Bright copper pans were stacked on the table and boxes containing packets of tea, sugar, flour, all dry goods in the one box, were strewn about. Jars held the results of pear-bottling, jam-making. Dolly and Nessie’s chairs would be the last to go. Over at Summer Place hordes of workmen were getting ready to build in the modern kitchen which the older servants such as Dolly and Nessie were rather dreading and to which the younger ones were eagerly looking forward. Hot running water from an independent domestic boiler, a gas cooker, streamlined cupboards on the walls, tall ones used as larders, smaller ones for general storage. They would, of course, retain the butler’s pantry, the stillroom and the wine cellar. The room was half-tiled and painted white to give a feeling of airiness, and had a cork floor for easy cleaning, a kitchen cabinet instead of an old dresser on which to stand glass storage jars.

Will was concerned with none of this. He would tell everyone to stay here. Dolly would look after him, he yelled, running to put an arm round Dolly’s shoulder. She patted him and shushed him and wept quietly for the frightened child. She could not bear to see the little lad upset so she looked hopefully at Rose, despite knowing it was no good.

‘Well, you see, lovey, we can’t stay here. Another family is ter stay at Beechworth so—’

‘What!’ Will roared. ‘In our house? Don’t be ’diculous, Dolly. This is Rose’s house, our house and nobody else is going to come and live here. I don’t want to leave here until Tim comes back and if they come and try to—’

‘Tim’s not going back,’ a voice from the far end of the kitchen said. A soft, apologetic voice, hesitant and sad. ‘He’s gone away, old chap.’

They all, as one, turned to Charlie who was leaning against the wall. Dolly grasped Will more firmly, trying her best to get him on to her lap but he escaped her loving arms and flew across the kitchen, ready, it appeared, to thump Charlie with his small fists, shouting, ‘No, no, no, no,’ but Charlie caught him, held him close and stroked his dark curls.

‘You’ve still got me, Will,’ he said humbly.

‘I don’t want you! Want Tim. Stay here . . .’

It took over an hour to calm the small, distraught boy and then only because Rose slipped a soothing powder into the milk he consented to drink. When he was finally in a deep sleep in his bed there were more than a few tears shed in Beechworth House.

C
harlie and Will crouched between the huge, tangled roots of an oak tree in the woodland at the back of Summer Place. They were two small boys, despite one being twenty-five years older than the other. They were watching a squirrel, a beautiful red squirrel struggling across the clearing with an acorn between its small paws.

It was October and the woodland trees were fast losing their leaves which lay in a soggy carpet across the clearing. There had been a lot of rain in the last few weeks and a pool had formed in its centre across which bright golden rays of sunlight fell. The squirrel delicately skirted the pool, careful not to drop the acorn which, Charlie whispered in Will’s ear, it would add to its hoard for the coming winter, and the two
lads
, as Dolly called them, remained very still in order not to disturb the wildlife. Reflected in the water of the pool were the misted shapes of beech and oak trees and now and again a shrivelled russet leaf spiralled slowly from branch to ground. Beyond the oak wood lay a swathe of conifers and in the space where they had been cut on the orders of the new gamekeeper at Summer Place, grew grasses, bracken and wild flowers. Charlie told Will that at Christmas they would choose one of the conifers to take home and place in the wide hallway or the drawing room and decorate it with candles, coloured baubles and on the very top would be an angel. It was something that lay secretly in his damaged brain. Something from the past that he had suddenly remembered.

It was three months since Tim and Alice had vanished and Rose and Harry had made no attempt to find them. Charlie, since his injury during the war, had imperceptibly slowed down. Not only in his mind and whatever memories – if any – he had but in his speech and his movements. They had all learned to wait patiently as he trawled from deep within himself an answer to a question. His physical health was good. He ate all Mrs Philips’s superbly cooked food that was set before him and was strong and bronzed, spending all his time outdoors with his growing son. He had not at first recognised the boy as his but he now loved him just the same and all he remembered as a boy about his surroundings, about the wildlife that teemed on the hundreds of acres was passed on to Will. Beechworth estate, added on to Summer Place, was an ideal and vast school in which teacher and pupil ranged.

But the boy’s education must include more than outdoor pursuits since Will was five years old. Though he could stumble through young children’s books, thanks to Rose, and add one number to another up to twenty, thanks, strangely, to the vanished Tim, he needed more than that to progress in the world and make a career for himself. Harry wanted to send him to the same public school that he and Charlie had attended.

When it became apparent that Alice had gone for good and Charlie was in no state to decide what his son should do, it was up to Rose and Harry to see he received a good grounding in basic subjects in order for him to be accepted into a preparatory school, perhaps later go on to university. And so a tutor must be found for him.

But where to start? Again, like Tim, the tutor was one of the army of ex-servicemen, who still tramped this country fit for heroes, in which they all were, looking for work. Mark Newton, Sergeant Mark Newton, aged thirty-five, was at the back of the queue even of these unfortunates because he had lost a leg in the last month of the war and, since he was forced to walk miles every day, it was not healing as it should. He was clever, well educated and had the added attribute of having been a teacher before the war. Those who did need a labourer, a gardener, an odd-job man, would not however employ a man with only one leg. His wife and children had lost their lives in an air raid, killed when a bomb dropped from a Zeppelin on to their home. He was a sad man, numbed by what had happened to him and was on the point of doing away with himself when he knocked on the back door of Summer Place.

Harry said he would give him a try. As children are, Will was fascinated with anything unusual, even gruesome, and was won over at once when Sergeant Mark, as he was for ever to be called, showed him his half-healed stump which had been amputated just above the knee where shrapnel had sliced it. He explained to Will – and the horrified maidservants who watched – how the prosthesis was removed, fastened back on and the workings of what would have been his own knee. He walked with Will, ran with him and even played kick-ball though it caused him agony.

Harry had been impressed by his patience with the child and, more importantly, how he held Will’s interest during his month’s trial. Knowing Will’s stubborn nature, his absolute refusal to stay in one place for any length of time, his wilfulness and defiance of authority, Harry saw that Sergeant Mark seemed to have a knack of controlling the boy and keeping him every morning for three hours.

‘Did you know that Sergeant Mark’s grandfather was at the well at Cawnpore? That’s in India by the way.’ Their horrified faces were frozen round the kitchen. ‘It was filled, the well, I mean, with dead ladies and children. The Indians did it.’

‘Will,’ gasped Rose but Harry silenced her and later told her that most little boys were bloodthirsty monsters but grew out of it and though it was a terrible time in British history – his own grandfather had fought there – Mark had taught Will not only history, but geography too. He had captured the boy’s interest and gradually the pair of them spent their three hours without recourse to such horrors as the Indian Mutiny.

‘Are you cold, Rose?’ Will asked her on one occasion. It was a bitter winter afternoon after he and Charlie had been out on one of their forays, riding this time, and were drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen. ‘Shall I
fermer la fenêtre, madame
?’ then turned and beamed.

‘I didn’t know you spoke French, darling,’ Rose said, trying to keep the tremor of laughter out of her voice.

‘
Mais oui
. Mark taught me, an’ me an’ Charlie often “
parlez
”, don’t we, Charlie?’

They all waited for Charlie to answer. It took nearly a minute but they had become accustomed to him.

He smiled his slow, sweet smile. ‘
Mais oui, bien sûr
.’

‘There,’ said Will triumphantly and Rose thanked the gods who, in the guise of Mark Newton, had sent this blessing on them. Between them, Charlie and Mark, both damaged themselves, were turning this little savage, as he once had been, into a cheerful, normal child. He still had his tantrums, of course, but usually a word from Mark calmed him down.

The servants had settled into their new places. Tom, Jossy and Wilbur – one more of the army’s tramping outcasts and who was the new gardener’s boy – were preparing the three acres of garden for the coming spring, Tom tutting over the neglect of a once splendid garden. Harry and Charlie’s grandmother had been a keen amateur gardener and the polite and genteel society in which she and the then Sir Walter Summers had mixed had been delighted to receive invitations to their home and beautiful gardens. There had been garden parties, tennis parties, shooting parties, all gone now but the present owner and his hugely pregnant wife were determined to restore it to its former glory, thanks to the wealth Lady Summers had brought to the marriage.

Indoors Dolly and Nessie were happy to take tea in the housekeeper’s sitting room while Mrs Philips, who was a good deal younger, supervised her half a dozen maidservants and trained up a new kitchen maid by the name of Peggy, turning out splendid meals with a little help – when they felt up to it – from Dolly and Nessie. It was grand, Dolly confessed to Nessie – since she had begun to feel her age – to sit back but be there if their combined experience was needed. All the girls slept at the top of the house in their newly decorated rooms, one to each room and the men, except Tom who shared a cottage with his Nessie, were housed in the comfortable and perfectly adequate rooms above the stable block.

Only Mark had his own room in the house. At each of the four corners of Summer Place was a turret reached by a winding staircase and in one of them he slept and kept the endless books he bought with his own more than adequate salary. He was a reclusive man and could it be wondered at, Rose said to Harry as she fidgeted in their bed, doing her best to find a comfortable position with the burden she carried. Harry fidgeted with her, doing
his
best to help her since she was very near her time. So near that when Harry was fast asleep she clasped his arm in such a relentless grip she nearly pushed him out of bed.

‘What the devil . . .’ he spluttered, but was alert at once, for Rose had heaved herself on to her feet and begun to roam about the room.

‘The baby?’ he asked tentatively.

‘Of course it’s the baby, you great idiot.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, go and get Dolly.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather lie down, my darling?’ Harry was pulling on his quilted dressing gown, bought for him by his wife at Christmas.

‘No, I wouldn’t so stop arguing,’ she snapped, leaning over the dressing table, her hands gripping the edge as she communed with the pain.

‘Right, I’ll be off then,’ as though he were to take a trip to China.

‘And be damn quick about it, Harry Summers. I don’t think I’ll be long.’

‘Shall I stay then?’

‘Can you deliver a baby?’ gasping as she was gripped again.

A look of horror came over his face. ‘No, I bloody can’t.’ And with a last despairing look at his wife’s bowed back, he shot out of the door shouting Dolly’s name and waking every last one of the residents except Will who, Dolly said, wouldn’t wake up if a brass band marched through his room.

‘Goddammit,’ Rose hissed through clenched teeth, ‘he’ll have the lot of them in here if he doesn’t calm down.’

But Dolly and Nessie soon had it all sorted out. Dolly was in her element. Hadn’t she delivered – well, helped – the very woman who was now to give birth herself?

‘I’m here, my lovely lass, and this lot are to go back to their rooms. Sir Harry’s on the landing asking every two minutes; he’s telephoned the doctor. A new fellow, it seems, who says he’s an expert in obstetrics, whatever they are. He’s – no, not the doctor – Sir Harry is a damn nuisance like all men. The doctor’s called Dr Standish; he’ll be here soon. See, take Dolly’s arm, pet.’ The two of them sauntered about the room as though they were in a sun-lit garden while Nessie got the bed ready with old sheets and towels and an old nightgown was put on Rose and when suddenly she expressed a desire to lie down they helped her gently on to the bed. They paused each time she hung her head and communed with the pain. They were both women who had never borne a child but they had helped in many a confinement on the estate. When the labouring mother was tranquil they moved about the room, then suddenly Rose screamed and bore down upon the pain and collapsed on the bed.