Stella Bain (25 page)
Phillip lives on Beacon Hill. He has a town house he bought with his share of the family money. A man he loves, perhaps not the same man as before, has elegant rooms nearby. Phillip is a poet of some repute and is not afraid to go about in public, the surgeries having repaired more of the damage. She and August visit him from time to time when they are in Boston. Because of the scar tissue, Phillip looks exceptionally pale and perhaps unwell, and he wears dark glasses and a hat, and possibly you might not want to introduce yourself to him. But you could not say for certain, in the shade, that he had been damaged by the war.
When she stands before the God she has renounced, this will be her greatest sin, not to have known that Clara was lying. A lie that set in motion Phillip Asher’s demise. The man humiliated, twice ruined, once in Thrupp, and then on a field in France. And yet somehow thriving despite it all.
After the visit to the convalescent home, she rode back with August to his house. Once inside the door, with Streeter discreetly dismissed and the nanny upstairs with Sebastian for his nap, August kissed her again and again. Each had waited for the other for so long. She remembers that a carillon was ringing from a church tower. That night, in her old bed, the one she had when she was a guest in that house, his body was persuasive, and she discovered again the joys of the erotic life. He was an inventive lover, always tender.
She pinches her cheeks and wets her lips. She can see him coming down the lane. She listens for his footsteps on the narrow stairway.
“Etna,” he says, as if she were new to him.
She sees, in quick succession, a smile, a perspiring brow. He comes to where she stands by the window and rests an elbow on the wooden rail. He wears a shirt with the sleeves rolled, the tie loosened, the collar open but not removed.
“You have on your dark glasses,” she says.
“Do I?” he asks, pulling them off his face. He studies them as if alchemy has been involved. He takes his clear spectacles from his pocket. But she has seen him naked, with the lost look of the myopic.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asks. “You’re perspiring somewhat.” She touches his brow.
“Maybe a little tired is all.”
She had a bout of the flu the previous winter, and it weakened her—her lungs never very strong after that first collapse in Bryanston Square. They are shortly to travel to London with Sebastian for their annual visit so that he may see his relatives. August will deliver a series of lectures at the British Psychoanalytic Society.
Her heart is wild and loose inside her chest.
“Are
you
feverish?” he asks, misunderstanding.
“No, I’m perfect,” she answers and laughs.
“Do you remember everything?” she asks.
“Every moment, no.”
“I wish I could. How long can you stay this time?”
“Until Tuesday, anyway.”
“What about the patients?”
“The Monday patients have been rescheduled.”
August, too, has a set of rooms on Beacon Hill, one of which he uses as an office. Streeter, who still attends to August when he is in the city, gambles on the horses and seems, despite the odds, to have made a small fortune for himself.
“Did I tell you that I have a patient with intractable shell shock? The man was nineteen when he went to war. He’s thirty-two now. He can’t stop cowering at any loud noise. He’s woken up screaming from the same horrifying dream for twelve years. His wife is beside herself. She keeps asking, ‘How long? How long?’”
“Don’t give up on him,” Etna pleads.
She remembers her own affliction, now immortalized in August’s monograph on her case, the one he wrote after completing his training in psychiatry. To think of herself still wandering the earth, unaware that she has children. She cannot bear to imagine.
“How long before the last soldier of the Great War is dead?” she muses.
“Theoretically?” August peers out the window. “Well, if the boy got to France just under the wire in 1918, when he was seventeen, and he lived to be ninety-five, say…” He pauses. “His last Remembrance Day would be November eleventh, 1996. If he lived to be a hundred, it would be November eleventh, 2001.”
“Unthinkable!” she exclaims.
“Unthinkable.”
“They’d put him at the head of the parade.”
“I should hope so.”
“What’s the news from Benedict?” she asks.
“Benedict?”
She smoothes the skirt of her dress. “Any news?”
“A family from Virginia is building a house just beyond his.”
“On the hill?”
“If you can call it that.”
“Does Benedict mind?”
“No. I rather think he likes it. More business. There will be carpenters and so forth. Men to feed.”
“Is it to be a summer place?” she asks. “For the family?”
“I think so, yes.”
She leans her head against his shoulder. He encircles her waist with his arms. What is it, after all, that she has done with her life? She had children and found them again. She fell in love at nineteen and again at forty-two. She tried to be an independent woman. She has earned her living by making pictures, some that disturb, some that please.
“Are you ready to go down?” he asks. “The lobsters await. Benedict’s wife cooked them up. They’re still hot in the paper bag. We’ll eat on the back porch?” He kisses her hair.
She remembers the day they married. They stood by the sea in front of the cottage, only family in attendance to hear their private words. August gave her an emerald ring, and afterward they drove to Portsmouth for a celebratory lunch. They drank Champagne and devoured oysters and stayed until nearly teatime.
My enormous thanks to Asya Muchnick, whose lovely demeanor and skill have been a joy to me; to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my kind, funny, and razor-sharp agent, who is
always
there when I need her; to Michael Pietsch, good friend and editor, who has been with me for nearly two decades of writing novels; to Caroline MacDonald-Haig, a London Blue Badge guide with tremendous knowledge of London, who shepherded me through that city; to Ivor Braka, who was kind enough to let me see the interior of his London house; to Lucie Dean, friend and enthusiastic guide, whose idea of “research” in London so closely matched my own—a necessary visit to the Imperial War Museum followed immediately by a trip to Harrods; to Katherine Clemans and Amy Van Arsdale, who both hold doctorates in psychology and who corrected mistakes in certain portions of the manuscript; to Richard Beswick, my British editor, who contributed a great deal to this book, both by pointing out Americanisms that would have been incorrect in British English and by giving me the idea of the trial; to Christopher Clemans, whose editorial acumen has recently been an inspiration to me; and to my good-natured husband, John Osborn, who silently put up with my moaning through all seven drafts of this novel and who is always ready to celebrate any good fortune that comes my way.
Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of seventeen novels, including
Rescue; A Change in Altitude; Testimony; The Pilot’s Wife,
which was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club; and
The Weight of Water,
which was a finalist for England’s Orange Prize. She was awarded the John P. Marquand Prize in American Literature. She lives in Massachusetts.
