The Shifting Fog (37 page)

‘Wouldn’t be surprised if it rains tomorrow,’ he said finally, still looking out the window.

‘I’ve always liked the rain.’

Mr Frederick did not answer.

I finished loading the supper tray. ‘Will that be all, miss?’

She had forgotten I was there. She turned to me. ‘Yes. Thank you Grace.’ With a sudden movement, she reached out and took my hand. ‘I’ll miss you, Grace, when I go.’

‘Yes miss.’ I curtseyed, my cheeks flushed with sentiment. ‘I’ll miss you too.’ I curtseyed to Mr Frederick’s turned back. ‘Goodnight, m’Lord.’

He appeared not to have heard.

I wondered what it was that brought him to Hannah’s room. What it was he had to say on the eve of her wedding that could not have been said at dinner, or afterwards in the drawing room. I left the room, pulled the door behind me, and then, I am ashamed to say, I lay the tray on the corridor floor and leaned in close.

There was a long silence and I began to fear the doors were too thick, Mr Frederick’s voice too quiet. Then I heard him clear his throat.

He spoke quickly, his tone low. ‘Emmeline I expected to lose as soon as she was of an age, but you?’

‘You’re not losing me, Pa.’

‘I am,’ he said, volume rising sharply. ‘David, my factory, now you. All my dearest …’ He checked himself and when he spoke again his voice was so tight it threatened to buckle. ‘I’m not blind to my part in all this.’

‘Pa?’

There was a pause and the bedsprings squeaked. Mr Frederick’s voice, when he spoke, had shifted position and I imagined he now
sat on the foot of Hannah’s bed. ‘You are not to do this,’ he said quickly. ‘There are other ways.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking of—’

Squeak
. He was on his feet again. ‘The very idea of you living amongst those people. It makes my blood … No, it’s out of the question. I should have put my foot down earlier, before any of this business got out of hand.’

‘Pa—’

‘I didn’t stop David in time, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to make the same mistake twice.’

‘Pa—’

‘I won’t let you—’

‘Pa,’ Hannah said, and in her voice was a firmness that had not been there before. ‘I’ve made my decision.’

‘Change it,’ he roared.

‘No.’

I was frightened for her. Mr Frederick’s tempers were legend at Riverton. He had refused all contact with David when he dared deceive him. What would he do now, faced with Hannah’s outright defiance?

His voice quivered, white with rage. ‘You would answer no to your father?’

‘If I thought him wrong.’

‘You’re a stubborn fool.’

‘I’m like you.’

‘To your folly, my girl,’ he said. ‘Your strength of will has always inclined me to leniency, but this I will not tolerate.’

‘It’s not your decision, Pa.’

‘You are my child and you’ll do as I say.’ He paused and an unwanted note of desperation coloured his anger. ‘I order you not to marry him.’

‘Pa …’

‘Marry him,’ his volume leapt, ‘and you won’t be welcome here.’

On the other side of the door, I was aghast and afraid. For though I understood Mr Frederick’s sentiment, shared his desire to keep Hannah at Riverton, I also knew threats were never a way to make her change her mind.

Sure enough, her voice when she spoke was steely with resolve. ‘Goodnight, Pa.’

‘Fool,’ he said in the bewildered tone of one who couldn’t yet believe the game has been played and lost. ‘Stubborn fool of a child.’

His footsteps drew near and I hurried to pick up my tray. Was withdrawing from the door when Hannah said: ‘I’ll be taking my maid with me when I go.’ My heart leapt as she continued. ‘Myra will look after Emmeline.’

I was so surprised, so pleased, I barely heard Mr Frederick’s reply. ‘You’re welcome to her.’ He pushed the door so furiously I almost dropped my tray, strode toward the stairs. ‘Lord knows I don’t need her here.’

Why did Hannah marry Teddy? Because she loved him? Perhaps. She was young and inexperienced—to what would she compare her feelings?

Because she believed marriage was her ticket to freedom? Undoubtedly. Lady Clementine, with Fanny’s help, had seen to that.

There were those that thought she was deserting a sinking ship, but those who whispered such had never known her. She wasn’t deserting the ship, she was saving it. Or thought she was.

And there was Emmeline to think of. Always, there was Emmeline to think of—she had promised as much to David she told me, the day he went to war. With Mr Frederick’s business as it was, marriage to Teddy was a way of looking after Emmeline. Ensuring her a future of connections and comfort.

Whatever the case, to outsiders the match was a good one. Simion and Estella Luxton were delighted, and so was everyone downstairs. Even I was pleased now that I was to accompany them. For Lady Violet and Lady Clementine were right, weren’t they? For all her youthful resistance, Hannah was sure to marry someone and surely Teddy was as good a catch as any?

They were married on a rainy Saturday in March 1919, and a week later we left for London. Hannah and Teddy in the car up front, while I shared the second car with Teddy’s valet and Hannah’s trousseau.

Mr Frederick stood on the stairs, stiff and pale. From where I sat, unseen in the second car, I was able, for the first time, to look properly upon his face. It was a beautiful, patrician face, though suffering had robbed it of expression.

To his left was the line of staff, in descending order of rank. Even Nanny had been exhumed from the nursery, and stood at half Mr Hamilton’s height, leaking silent tears into a white handkerchief.

Only Emmeline was absent, having refused to watch her sister leave. I saw her though, right before we left. Her pale face framed behind one of the etched Gothic panes of the nursery window. Or I thought I did. It may have been a trick of the light. One of the little boy ghosts who spent their eternity in the nursery.

I had already said my goodbyes. To the staff, and to Alfred. Since the night on the garden stairs we’d made tentative amends. We were circumspect these days, Alfred treating me with a polite caution almost as alienating as his irritation. Nonetheless, I’d promised to write. Extracted from him an undertaking to do likewise.

And I’d seen Mother the weekend before the wedding. She’d given me a little package of things: a shawl she had knitted years before, and a jar of needles and threads so that I might keep up my stitching. When I’d thanked her she’d shrugged and said they were no use to her; she wouldn’t be like to use them now her fingers were locked and as good as useless. On that last visit she’d asked me questions about the wedding and Mr Frederick’s factory and Lady Violet’s death. She surprised me, taking her former mistress’s death easily. I’d come lately to realise that Mother had enjoyed her years of service, yet when I spoke of Lady Violet’s final days she offered no condolences, no fond remembrances. She merely nodded slowly and let her face relax into an expression of remarkable dispassion.

But I did not think to query it then, for my mind was full of London.

The dull thump of faraway drums. Do you hear them, I wonder, or is it just me?

You have been patient. And there is not much longer to wait. For into Hannah’s world, Robbie Hunter is about to make his return. You knew he would, of course, for he has his part to play. This is not a fairytale, nor a romance. The wedding does not the mark
the happy ending of this story. It is simply another beginning, the ushering in of a new chapter.

In a far grey corner of London, Robbie Hunter wakes. Shrugs off his nightmares and pulls a small parcel from his pocket. A parcel, nursed in his breast pocket since the final days of war, its safe delivery promised to a dying friend.

PART 3

The Times

6 JUNE 1919

The Estate Market

LORD SUTHERLAND’S PROPERTY

The principal transaction this week has been the private sale, by Messrs. Mabbett and Edge, as briefly announced in The Times yesterday, of Haberdeen House, the ancestral home of Lord Sutherland. The house, at number seventeen Grosvenor Square, was sold to the industrialist Mr S. Luxton, and is to be occupied by Mr T. Luxton and his new wife, the Honourable Hannah Hartford, eldest daughter of Lord Ashbury.

Mr T. Luxon and the Hon. H. Hartford were married from the bride’s family home, Riverton Manor, outside the village of Saffron Green, in March and are now honeymooning in France. They will take up residence at Haberdeen House, to be renamed Luxton House, when they return to England next month.

Mr T. Luxton is the Tory candidate for the seat of Marsden in East London. The seat will be contested in a bi-election in November.

CATCHING BUTTERFLIES

They have brought us to the spring fair by minibus. Eight in all: six residents, Sylvia and a nurse whose name I can’t remember—a young girl with a wispy plait snaking down her back to sweep her belt. I expect they think the day out does us good. Though what can be gained from exchanging comfortable surrounds for a muddy oval of tents selling cakes and toys and soaps I do not know. I should have been just as happy to stay at home, away from the bustle.

A makeshift stage has been erected behind the town hall, as it is each year, and rows of white plastic chairs assembled before it. The other residents and the girl with the plait are sitting by the stage watching a man pluck numbered ping-pong balls from a metal bucket, but I prefer it here on the little iron seat by the memorial. I feel strange today. It is the heat, I’m sure. When I woke my pillow was damp, and I’ve been unable to shake this odd foggy sensation all morning. My thoughts are skimming. Coming quickly, fully formed, then slipping away before I can properly grasp them. Like catching a butterfly. It is unsettling, leaves me irritable.

A cup of tea will see me right.

Where has Sylvia gone? Did she tell me? She was here only a moment ago, about to smoke a cigarette. Talking again about her man-friend and their plans to cohabit. Once upon a time I’d have
considered such extramarital relations improper, but time has a way of changing one’s views on most things.

The exposed skin on the top of my feet is cooking. I consider slipping them into the shade but an irresistible sense of masochistic ennui bids me leave them where they are. Sylvia will see the red patches later, will realise how long she has left me.

From where I sit I see the cemetery. The eastern side with its line of poplars, new leaves quivering at the suggestion of a breeze. Beyond the poplars, on the other side of the ridge, are the gravestones, amongst them my mother’s.

It’s been an age since we buried her. A wintry day in 1922 when the earth was frozen solid and my skirts blew icy against my stockinged legs, and a figure, a man, stood on the hill, barely recognisable. She took her secrets with her, into the cold, hard earth, but I learned them in the end. I know a lot about secrets; I have made them my life. Perhaps I hoped in some way that the more I learned of secrets, the better I would be at hiding my own.

I am hot. It is far too hot for April. No doubt global warming is to blame. Global warming, melting the polar ice caps, the ozone hole, genetically modified food. Some other disease of the 1990s. The world has become a hostile place. Even the rainwater is not safe these days, acid rain they call it.

That’s what’s eating the war monument. One side of the soldier’s stone face has been ravaged, the cheek pockmarked, the nose devoured by time. Like a piece of fruit left too long in a ditch, gnawed by scavengers.

He knows about duty. Despite his wounds he stands to attention atop the cenotaph, as he has for eighty years, lone eye surveying the plains beyond the town, hollow gaze cast over Bridge Street toward the car park of the new shopping centre; a land fit for heroes. He is almost as old as I am. Is he as tired?

He and his pillar have become mossy; microscopic plants thrive in the etched names of the dead. David’s is on there, at the top with the other officers; and Rufus Smith the ragman’s son, suffocated in Belgium by a collapsed trench. Further down, Raymond Jones, the village peddler when I was a girl. Those little boys of his would be men now. Old men, though younger than I. It is possible they are dead.

No wonder he is crumbling. It is a lot to ask of one man, to bear the strain of near-infinite private tragedies, bear witness to near-infinite echoes of death.

But he is not alone: there is one like him in every English town. They are the nation’s scars; a rash of gallant scabs spread across the land in 1919, a spate of determined healing. Such extravagant faith we had then: in the League of Nations, the possibility of a civilised world. Against such determined hope the poets of disillusionment were lost. For every TS Eliot, for every RS Hunter, there were fifty bright young men espousing Tennyson’s dreams of the parliament of man, the federation of the world.

It didn’t last of course. It couldn’t. Disillusionment was inevitable; after the twenties came the depression thirties and then another war. And things were different after that one. No new memorials emerged triumphantly, defiantly, hopefully out of the mushroom cloud of World War Two. Hope perished in the gas chambers of Poland. A new generation of the battle-damaged were blown home and a second set of names chiselled onto the bases of existing statues; sons below fathers. And in everybody’s mind, the weary knowledge that some day young men would once again be falling, falling.

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that; it isn’t flat or linear; it has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternative version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.

I have been trying to fix upon the turning points in Hannah and Teddy’s story; all thoughts, these days, lead to Hannah. Looking back it seems clear: there were certain events in the first year of their marriage that laid the foundation of what was to come. I couldn’t see them at the time; in real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabelled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by a storyteller, a historian, trying to bring order to a lifetime of tangled memories.