The Summer Before the War (10 page)

“Hear, hear,” said Farmer Bowen, to cover the fact that he had no Latin whatsoever.

“I absolutely agree that repetition is the mother of all studies,” said Beatrice Nash in a firm tone. “But I do find that the more ways one can vary the necessary practice, the more one can commit to memory not just the text but the story and the meaning.”

“What we need is a master who'll not spare the rod,” said Mr. Pike. “These boys must forget stories and games and bend their backs into hard work if they're to acquire a respectable trade.”

“Well spoken, Mr. Pike,” said the Mayor.

“I'm sure Miss Nash is more than able to wield a cane to suitable effect,” said Lady Emily. “Do you play tennis, Miss Nash?”

“Tennis?” asked Beatrice. She looked bewildered, and Agatha sighed. She was used to the very different paths of logic by which her fellow board members pursued their thoughts, but she realized now that to an outsider the exchange must seem like a chapter from
Alice in Wonderland
.

“It's all in the wrist,” said Lady Emily.

“I do all the serious caning myself,” said the Headmaster. “I find it adds to the gravity to have the offending child take the long walk to my office. They are usually quite cowed by the time they see me.”

“I understand that you would also like to increase proficiency in Euclidian geometry?” asked Beatrice. “I have pursued advanced studies in both geometry and the newest algebraic theories.” They looked at her as if she had offered to demonstrate fire-eating. It seemed to Agatha that Beatrice now gave up the fight. Her shoulders seemed to slump, and she folded her hands in her lap.

“We are delighted in all your proficiencies,” said Agatha. “I believe we can let Miss Nash escape now?” They agreed, and as Beatrice left the room, Agatha looked over at Emily Wheaton, who was rigid with fury but who gave a small shake of the head. Agatha feared they were defeated.

“Could we ask Mr. Poot to come in now?” said the Headmaster to the girl who was holding the door for Beatrice.

“If my wife understood mathematics, maybe she'd keep tighter accounts and not be asking me for dress money every year,” said Mr. Pike.

“Perish the thought, man,” said Mr. Satchell. “I'd rather show my books to the excise man.”

Mr. Poot sat very stiff on the upright chair and fixed his gaze, carefully it seemed, on the Mayor's moving lips.

“Not because he's my nephew, of course,” the Mayor concluded after a long and enthusiastic summing-up of Mr. Poot's career. In the Mayor's telling, the man was something of a legend, thought Agatha. “But we would also be getting the benefit of his legal experience, and I believe he would be a figure our boys could look up to.”

“We have girls as well, Mr. Fothergill,” said Agatha.

“One or two, but they do not count in this case,” said the Mayor. “They cannot aspire to a legal career, whereas we may have several future clerks among our boys.”

“Mr. Poot, may we inquire further about your wish to exchange the law for teaching?” asked Lady Emily. “What propels you into academia?”

The young man swiveled his head towards her voice and opened his mouth to reply, but his head appeared to continue to revolve past her, and as slowly as in a dream, Mr. Poot toppled off his chair and lay in an inert heap on the carpet.

“Well, I imagine that had something to do with it,” said Agatha.

With neither the heart to hope nor the energy to repack her possessions, Beatrice Nash sat with a book open on her lap. She had, however, forgotten her reading and was instead engaged in the important task of staring at a small brown spider which was constructing a lopsided web in the lower corner of the cottage's front window. The spider seemed to lose its footing often and would drop, hanging from its trailing silk and tangling the lines, like an old lady dropping stitches in her knitting. Beatrice wondered how far the world extended for the spider. Did it have a warm spot in the garden to soak up the sun, or was its life circumscribed by the rough oak window frame and a small, dark hole in the painted sill? If it were accidentally dropped into a trunk and transported by ship to the wilds of South America, would it notice or would it just find another sill, another hole, and would the flicking tongue of a predatory lizard be no more a threat than Abigail's broom? Wishing to expand the spider's options in life, she caught up a portion of web and spider on the edge of her book and opened the stiff iron catch of the window to shake him out onto the street.

Shouted calls and the scrape of a horse's shoe on the cobbles made her lean out to look down the steep hill. A farm cart was coming up the narrow street, the straining horse coaxed not just by the farmer driving but by a boy walking at its head while other people pushed from behind. The cart contained a stack of objects wrapped and roped to such a dizzying height that it looked like some strange circus wagon. On top of the heap she could see Daniel, standing like a charioteer, whistling a jaunty martial tune and twirling a broad straw hat.

“You're not actually helping” came a voice, the narrow houses amplifying and projecting the sound towards her. She saw it was Hugh pushing behind the nearside back wheel.

“I'm directing the triumphant approach,” said Daniel. “One more push up the middle there, sir.” The farmer gave a crack of his whip, and the cart lurched forward, the load shifting dangerously backward and left. Daniel whooped but grabbed for a rope to steady himself, and the boy at the horse's head had to step nimbly aside as horse and wooden shafts thrust forward.

“Do be careful,” said Hugh. “I said we should have done it in two loads.”

“Where's the triumph in that?” said Daniel. “This is an arrival!”

“This is a spectacle,” said Hugh, raising his hat to three ladies who had wedged themselves into a doorway in fear.

The spectacle was increased by the blast of a car horn as Agatha Kent's car made the turn at the top of the lane and nosed down to the cottage. The horse gave a loud whinny and backed slightly before being wrestled to a stop. The car parked directly outside Beatrice's window and revealed Agatha Kent, sitting amid a pile of brown paper parcels and a bouquet of roses. Jenny the maid was squashed into the rumble seat clutching a quantity of mops and brooms, and from his perch on the running board, an aproned shop boy sprang down to haul a huge basket from the front seat. Agatha waved as Smith ran around the car to open her door, and Beatrice experienced a momentary desire to slam the window and flee into the back alley as she realized the spectacle was coming to her door.

“We are come with all the spoils of victory,” said Agatha, speaking through the window. She waved Jenny and the shop boy towards the front door, adding, “Do let's get inside before we disturb all the neighbors.”

“I don't understand,” said Beatrice.

“The position is yours, my dear,” said Agatha.

“But I thought…” Beatrice began.

“A mere formality, as I had supposed,” said Agatha. “Now, Hugh, do have them take great care with those bookcases. They were my mother's.”

Beatrice could only stand back, in shock, as the procession came into the tiny parlor: first Abigail carrying the shop basket; then Jenny and her mops; the farmer and his boy carrying a bookcase; and Agatha, ducking her hat under the doorframe and filling the room with the scent of pink roses.

“Is it true?” asked Beatrice. “I thought for sure Mr. Poot would be chosen.”

“Mr. Poot proved himself an—an unsteady candidate, shall we say,” said Daniel, coming into the crowded space carrying a stiff-backed chair.

“We shall not,” said Agatha in a reproving tone. “Do go through to the kitchen, Jenny, and get those few things put away. The bookcases either side of the fireplace, I think, don't you, Miss Nash? Oh, and these are for you, from the garden. Do you have a vase?”

Her bicycle had reached
a speed at which its wheels seemed to spin without effort. The dirt road thrummed beneath her, and a breeze of her own making refreshed her face and kept her cool even as she pumped her legs faster, boots pressed to the hard rubber pedals. Out here on the marsh, there seemed to be no other person in the world, only the flutter of white butterflies among the nodding meadowsweet and tall grasses that edged the green and weedy ditches. The very day seemed to dance within her, and Beatrice Nash hitched her blue serge skirts higher and let out a whoop of joy to have the whole day to herself.

To be established, for a week now, in a freshly scrubbed cottage, to be in possession of paying work, and to have found congenial acquaintances while being under no one's direction seemed to Beatrice fortunate indeed. Even when school began, she thought, there would be both the satisfaction of noble vocation and evenings free for reading and writing. And today she was a real writer. Her book was on its way to Mr. Caraway, her father's publisher, and she rode out of town with all the confidence that comes to a writer from having wrapped a finished work in several sheets of stout brown paper, secured it with strong twine and red sealing wax, and handed it in to the man in the Post Office.

On such a fair day, the summer bank holiday, Beatrice was inclined to be generous even towards the dark shadow of Mrs. Turber. That very morning, there had been a purse-lipped negotiation over the beef sandwich now in Beatrice's bicycle basket. It was Mrs. Turber's routine, and apparently much praised by the prior lodger, to provide a substantial noontime dinner and a cold supper at night. Evening dinner was offered only on Saturday nights and a glass of wine provided along with the best china. It was hardly decent, she said, to expect her to provide portable cold lunches, nor would a lady of Mrs. Turber's standing be caught eating such a lunch alone along a public road somewhere. Beatrice had pleaded summer weather and asked for a simple plate of dinner to be reheated and served on a tray in the evenings. Mrs. Turber had grudgingly called for Abigail to make the sandwich, but she'd continued to sniff her disapproval, and only a gleam in the eye betrayed a possible satisfaction that a widow could be forgiven for pocketing some small savings from this arrangement. Breathing the fresh air of the fields and basking in the sun, Beatrice laughed aloud and vowed to treat the widow with such resolute and kindly respect that her landlady's crusty air of suffering must eventually give way.

She followed the ribbons of country lanes across vast fields of corn and rye, through coppiced woods, and down the brief streets of thatch-roofed hamlets. She lost track of time, and the sun was over her shoulder before she thought to take stock of her location. Coasting to a stop at a crossroads, she looked about to fix her direction. Without the clatter of her wheels, the world seemed to fall into silence. It was so still, she could hear the slight rustle of dry corn in the field and the lumbering buzz of a fat bee somewhere on the far side of a thorny hedge. No voice or sound of human occupation broke across the sleeping fields. She had traveled further than she had meant, but climbing onto the lower rungs of a five-bar gate, she looked across the marsh and was pleased to see the very top of Rye's hill, just the church tower and a couple of rooftops, peeking above the plain. The coast lay to her south, and the curving bluff of the Sussex Downs formed a continuous wall to the north. Above her head the sky was clear of clouds and seemed to enclose the marsh in a protective blue bowl. There was, she reasoned, no way to be lost. She would eat her picnic and then just meander home, keeping always to the west, until she found herself on familiar pathways.

As she ate, and drank from a glass bottle of water that was still cold to the touch, Beatrice reflected that Mrs. Turber's fare might be meager but that, like all food, it was greatly improved by being eaten outdoors. Fleeting images of other picnics asked to be remembered, and she held them in trembling stillness, waiting for the sudden stab, like that of a toothache, which too often came from remembering her father. No clutch of pain came, and so she allowed, tentatively, the memory of freshly caught fish cooked on an apparatus of sticks by a large bonfire on a California beach; her father and two other professors, poking the fish with their knives and telling stories as if they were rough backwoodsmen rather than soft-handed academics with gracious front porches on a leafy campus, and tenure. Their wives unpacked pies from towel-lined baskets and passed cold flagons of birch beer and lemonade, and she, next to her father, her back tucked against a warm boulder, was free to listen and to turn her face alternately from the warmth of the fire to the dark, eternal crashing of the ocean surf.

A smaller picnic came to her—just the two of them and a slow walk away from the musk of the sickroom, up a grassy avenue of giant elms, like a green cathedral, to a stile looking over a valley of neat hedged fields. She had asked the kitchen for two soft bread rolls and hot chicken soup, in one of Lord Marbely's newfangled Thermos flasks, and had slipped into his study to fill her father's hip flask with brandy. She remembered a childlike urge to get her father out of the house, away from the dour private nurse. The walk had been painfully slow, her father's breathing labored and her own urgency becoming a frustration. She remembered a sudden feeling of anger towards him, as if it were his fault that the sun and breeze did not restore him, and a swift shame in the recognition of her own selfish desire not to have to endure his decline.

They settled on the step of the stile, and her father sipped soup, laced with brandy, from a metal cup held in shaky hands. He pronounced it nectar though he could not drink more than half a cup, and she finished it while he looked at the vale below with the unblinking stare of a statue. She grew frightened and laid a hand on his to call him back to her.

“Father?” He responded with a wavering smile and lifted his arm with difficulty to wave at the view as he quoted,

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

In his own ground.

It had been their game and a favorite parlor trick since her early childhood for him to startle her with lines of poetry and demand citation. She could remember many social evenings where she had been suddenly called upon and much fussed over by ladies who thought her a clever little monkey.

“Alexander Pope, ‘Ode to Solitude,' ” she said quietly. She knew they were both seeing the poem in their heads. Neither of them quoted from the final stanza: “Thus unlamented let me die…”

“Of course he quite borrowed the thought from old Horace,” her father said, and it was then that she sank to her knees and hid her tearful face in his lap.

Had her father been Catholic, she was quite sure he would have critiqued the priest during the last rites. He had left with his solicitors a list of hymns and readings for his funeral. However, the list was simply obscure lines from each, and there was a note to “ask Beatrice.” She smiled to remember Aunt Marbely's growing apoplexy as the selections, each piece more unsuitable than the last, were slowly revealed. She stood up and shook out her napkin, determined not to spoil such a lovely day with angry tears. As she collected her bicycle, the thought came, unbidden, that she might entertain Agatha and her nephews with this story of her father's last instructions. That Beatrice Nash should have new friends with which to share such amusing anecdotes was such a novel idea that she laughed aloud and startled a rabbit from the hedge.

An hour or more later, she had circled back to the very same crossroads. She could see the gate and the dent in the grass where she had sat to enjoy her picnic. She was tired now and thirsty from Mrs. Turber's salty beef. The marsh, so flat and open to the horizon, had transformed itself into an impenetrable maze of crooked lanes and dykes with no bridges. In the fields, sheep shaved the grass with their black lips and looked at her with sly eyes. She could now understand how smugglers in centuries past had managed to elude the excise men over this seemingly simple landscape. Taking a deep breath to quell a rush of anxiety, Beatrice decided not to force her way west but to ride north, towards the bluffs where she remembered the canal and its road, built to defeat Napoleon, which would take her home to Rye. Hugh had told her about the canal, and as she remembered sensible Hugh, she took heart and set off once again with renewed determination.

Fear is a great spur to endeavor, and when Beatrice at last slowed her pace, she had covered some miles and the canal and the main road were just before her, the dark line of trees and cliff welcome after the flat heat of the marsh. Unfortunately, the slackening of velocity revealed a trembling in her exhausted limbs. Just before the junction where the lane crossed a small bridge to meet the main road, the bicycle gave a large wobble side to side and then, with the front wheel catching on the dry, rutted surface, it tumbled Beatrice sideways into a bramble-filled ditch, catching her right ankle a severe blow as it fell on top of her.

She lay very still, thinking only that the ditch felt dry and that this was a blessing. The herbal scents of crushed weeds and the woody smell of warm blackberry brambles were thick around her head, and the sunlight was pleasantly fractured and dappled by the canopy of a tree. Rubbing at a small trickle of blood on her neck from a bramble scratch, she searched her pocket, glad once more to be carrying one of her father's sensible handkerchiefs in place of the cambric scraps usually favored by young ladies. A wood pigeon, always the cello in the orchestra of birdsong, gave out its low double coo from the shade. But for the throb, like a beat from a large drum, which began to vibrate in her right ankle, she thought it would have been very pleasant just to lie there.

Hugh was conscious of the need to keep the horse and trap going at a smart pace if he and his aunt were to reach their final visit and be back for tea. Yet at the same time, his aunt was in some fear of breaking the fresh eggs in their flannel-lined basket and of shaking the milk custard and the jellied beef tea into a puddled mess in their crocks, so he was fully occupied in picking the smoothest parts of the unmade road and in keeping the horse steady through a firm but gentle pressure on the reins. The trip might have been smoother and swifter if they had taken the car, but his aunt felt strongly that sick visiting was not the occasion for ostentation and that she would not remind her poor but proud neighbors of their charity status by sweeping in with motorcar and finery. Indeed she wore a very plain dress and a beige linen driving duster, and her hat, which she kept for such visiting, was of plain straw and as modest in dimension as Cook's Sunday hat. Hugh wore a more formal suit, as befitted a representative of the medical profession. He had already visited today's patients with Dr. Lawton and had been charged with following up on an informal basis as he accompanied his aunt on her rounds. As they bowled briskly around one of the few slight turns of the Military Canal road, his eye caught sight of a female waving a large handkerchief from a roadside bench. He was poised to wave back as they drove by when his aunt startled him.

“Pull up, Hugh, pull up,” she said, tugging at his arm in a way that caused him to jerk at the horse's mouth and set the horse swerving towards the nearside ditch. Hauling the reins back, Hugh fought to draw the trap to a stop without causing the horse to plunge and rear.

“It's Beatrice Nash,” his aunt exclaimed. “I think she's in distress.”

Hugh handed over the reins and leaped down to the road, heedless of the dust. As he hurried towards the bench, he found himself praying that Beatrice had not been attacked on the road. She was disheveled and scratched, with blood on her neck and a large bruise on her arm. Her hair was tangled with thorns, and her skirt, he could see as he came close, was dark-stained and torn about the hem.