The Summer Before the War (2 page)

“All women can be pretty when they smile,” said the man. She whipped her face around to glare at him, but his eyes appeared to be still closed, and his face, round and sweating, remained sunk on its thick neck, wrapped in a greasy yellow cravat. He scratched at his shirtfront and yawned without covering his mouth, as if she didn't exist.

It was the cheapest kind of rebuke, to call a woman ugly, but one to which small boys and grown men seemed equally quick to stoop when feeling challenged. While she had always playfully dismissed her father's insistence on calling her his beauty, she believed she had a pleasant, regular face and took pride in a certain strength about the chin and a straight posture. That such an insult was a lie never seemed to reduce its effectiveness, and she could only bite her lip not to give him the satisfaction of a response.

The train slowed in a great hissing fog of steam, and she felt a flood of relief to hear the stationmaster calling, “Rye. Rye station.” She jumped up to take down her bag, lowered the window, heedless of the threat of flying cinders, and had her hand on the outside doorknob ready to open it at the earliest moment.

“Now the stars align,” said the young man, coming to press her towards the door, his bag against her leg. She almost wept to feel him breathing on her neck. “If you're staying in the area you must allow me to call on you.”

She opened the door and stepped from the carriage, nearly falling to the platform as the train gave a last lurch. She hit her left ankle with her bag and felt at least one hairpin come away from the side of her head. Not caring for her appearance or the pain, she fled towards the baggage car to retrieve her trunk and ran right into a man standing enveloped in the steam. She could not prevent a cry of fear as he grasped her elbow to stop them both from falling.

“Are you all right?” asked the man. “I'm terribly sorry.”

“Let go of me,” she said, and she could hear her voice fierce with suppressed rage.

The man, a young man, stepped back, raising his hands in submission. “I meant no offense, miss,” he said. “I'm terribly sorry.”

“I saw her first, Grange,” said the man from the train.

“Please leave me alone,” said Beatrice, holding her hand to her face. She was suddenly too exhausted to fight anymore. Her rage drained away, and she could feel her limbs tremble as if the light breeze were a winter squall.

“Wheaton, you're an ugly drunk,” said the young man in a voice so calm he might have been talking about the weather. “Can't you tell a respectable young woman from one of your floozies? Behave yourself.”

“Didn't think you were much for the ladies, Grange,” said Wheaton with a sly chuckle. “Or is that just your pretty cousin Daniel?”

“Don't be a bully, Wheaton,” the young man replied. “Go home before I'm obliged to make you go. No doubt you'll pound me into the ground, but you'll ruin those perfectly good clothes doing it.”

“I'm going; expected home for the fatted calf by my sobbing mother,” said Wheaton, unruffled by the veiled threat of physical harm. “You can have the schoolteacher.” He staggered away, and Beatrice felt her face flush.

“Are you Miss Nash?” asked the young man. She looked at him but could not trust herself to speak. “I'm Hugh Grange. My aunt, Agatha Kent, sent me to meet you.”

“I think I need to sit down,” she said. She could tell the young man had kind gray eyes, but she saw nothing else as the whole station began to slowly spin. “Please don't allow me to faint.”

“Here's a bench,” he said, and she felt his hand tugging urgently at her elbow. She sank down. “Good. Hang your head below your knees and breathe,” he added, and she felt her head pushed down towards the dusty bricks of the platform. She breathed deep, slow breaths, and relief came as a light sweat on her forehead.

“Sorry. Ridiculous of me.”

“Not at all.” She could see only a pair of country boots, well oiled but creased and scuffed with age. “I'm sorry Wheaton upset you.”

“He did no such thing. I just—I should have eaten more lunch, that's all. I usually eat very well when I travel.”

“It's important to keep up one's strength,” he said, and though she could not detect any note of sarcasm, she felt the anger she had held in all day return. She shivered again, and the young man, his fingers on the pulse in her left wrist, added, “Shall I go ask the stationmaster for some water, or do you think you can make it out to the car? We really should get you to my Aunt Agatha's right away.”

“I'm perfectly all right,” she said, standing up slowly. “I must see to my trunk and bicycle.”

“Smith will arrange to fetch them later from the stationmaster,” he said. “Let me carry your bag.”

Beatrice hesitated, but there was no hint of condescension in the young man's tone, and his blunt face showed worry in a single vertical crease between the eyes. He was trying to treat her well. She understood that not just in the past couple of hours, but in the past few months, she had lost some trust in how people would treat her. She blinked her eyes and handed him her bag without a word. He took it and hefted its unexpected weight.

“Sorry,” she said. “I packed too many books as always.”

“That's quite all right,” he said as he took her arm and steered her out through a side gate. “Though I hate to think how heavy the trunk must be. Maybe I'll ask the stationmaster to telephone for a cart and save the car from breaking an axle.”

On the ride up the hill away from town, the young woman kept her face averted and her gaze fixed on the passing hedges and cottages. Hugh contemplated the curve of her long neck with the thick brown hair loosely bunched at the nape. She must have been tired, and yet she did not have the rounded slump of permanent defeat that seemed to Hugh to be the hallmark of the schoolteachers he had known. Even his professors at Oxford, many of them secure in family and finances, had seemed to bow over time as if under the perpetual onslaught of student ignorance. The woman's summer traveling coat was made of thick, supple linen that seemed of some quality, and her trim jacket and skirt were fashionably narrow, though unadorned. He judged her to be almost his own age; perhaps twenty-two or -three to his august twenty-four. While she was not a tremulous girl fresh from the schoolroom, she was far from the dull spinster he had been expecting. He acknowledged a flicker of interest best investigated and fanned by conversation.

“I apologize again for poor Wheaton,” he said. “He's perfectly gentlemanly around women when he's sober, but when he drinks he sort of launches himself at any female in the vicinity.”

“Don't apologize,” she said. “Obviously it was my fault then for occupying a railway carriage in which he wished to ride?”

Hugh found himself flushing under her stare. “Not what I meant at all,” he said. “But men like Wheaton…”

“Are there different kinds then?” she asked.

“Different kinds?”

“Of men? Only the majority seem prone to some similar lapse of manners under the influence of alcohol.” She pressed her lips together, and Hugh began to wonder how to get himself out of the conversation.

“Do you wish me to apologize on behalf of us all?” he asked, quietly.

“I would prefer you did not apologize for anyone else,” she said. “My father always says that if we were as quick to own our own faults as we are to apologize for those of others, society might truly advance.”

“I'd say he's right, but woefully optimistic,” said Hugh. “Very religious man, is he?” He had a vision of a purse-lipped temperance type with thin fingers tapping the cover of a Bible.

The girl gave what could only be described as a snort of laughter and then covered her mouth with her gloved hand and seemed to struggle with her emotions.

“Sorry,” said Hugh, unable to bite back the word.

“Thank you,” she said at last. A smile transformed her face and set her brown eyes alight. “He died a year ago, and I didn't think it would be possible to laugh about him again.”

“Not religious then,” said Hugh.

“No,” she said. “Not exactly. But I do hope you won't repeat it to your aunt. I'm sure schoolteachers are expected to have irreproachable parents.”

“I'm sure they are,” he said. “Have you studied their other attributes?”

She gave him a doubtful look.

“I assure you I'm completely qualified,” she said. “But I've been told I have to work harder to cultivate an appropriate attitude of grateful subordination.”

“Lucky for you, my aunt has taken such a stand with the school governors that she would be loath to tell them her candidate was unsuitable,” he said as they drew up on the broad gravel forecourt of his aunt's comfortable villa. He meant it in fun, but he noticed the young woman looked worried as Smith opened her door. As she preceded him in to meet Aunt Agatha, he wondered if he should also have mentioned to her that she was in no way as plain as his aunt would have preferred.

Beatrice liked the house
right away. While its design conjured a medieval hall bred with a couple of thatched cottages, its large, commodious rooms, electric lights, and bright floors spoke of commerce and energy, not a household turning into stone under the geologic pressure of its own lineage. Lady Marbely had moved with the slow drag of a woman waiting her interment in the family crypt, her life and home dusty with protocol and made reclusive by walls of superiority. Beatrice did not know how Agatha Kent and her husband really stood in the world, but she did not think they were likely to pounce on all the flaws in her bloodline before the soup was on the dinner table.

“You must be Beatrice and you must be hungry,” said a plump woman in a slippery Oriental gown, coming out of the open glass doors leading to a living room with many lamps. She was of that certain age when the bloom of youth must give way to strength of character, but her face was handsome in its intelligent eyes and commanding smile, and her hair retained a youthful spring as it threatened to escape from its carefully pinned rolls. “I'm Agatha Kent, and this is my nephew Daniel Bookham.”

“How do you do,” he said without even a conventional trace of interest.

Though she had chosen to put the romantic notions of the schoolgirl behind her, Beatrice was not yet immune to a handsome face. With carefully disheveled brown hair falling into blue eyes, the sharpest of jawlines, and an almost downy moustache, Daniel Bookham was a very striking young man. Though she told herself that he was absurd in his carelessly tied cravat and generally bohemian affect, she was forced to squash a brief disappointment that he was younger than her.

“And you've already met my other nephew, Hugh Grange,” added Agatha. Beatrice turned and reconsidered him in the bright light of the front hall. He was taller than Daniel, by a head, and plain in a way that might be considered handsome when not compared directly to the almost classical form of his younger cousin. As his aunt dispensed him to see to the luggage and called for the maid to show her to her room, Beatrice decided it would be prudent to keep her eyes firmly in Hugh Grange's direction.

It was probably the third-best guest room, thought Beatrice, small and furnished with a narrow oak bed and a simple writing desk, but pleasantly decorated with blue striped wallpaper and flowery chintz curtains. A lace-skirted sink, with running water, occupied one corner, and a large window stood open to the night and the fragrance of the garden. In the distance, a shimmer of silver indicated the moonlit sea. Across the hall, the maid had proudly displayed a bathroom containing an enormous tub with a frightening array of brass taps and an ornate mahogany throne, the raised seat of which revealed an indoor water closet. A carved mahogany tank set high on the wall and a long brass chain gave it an almost ecclesiastical air.

“I know how to operate it, thank you,” said Beatrice, forestalling the maid's instructions.

“There's no other guests in this wing,” said the maid. “So you'll have it to yourself.”

“Are the gentlemen not staying?” asked Beatrice.

“They like to stay in their old rooms on the top floor,” said the maid. “Can't imagine how Master Hugh manages to sleep in that little bed of his, scrunched up like a hedgehog I expect, but he won't hear of moving, and Master Daniel tried the green room at the front for a while, but Master Hugh teased him something dreadful and Mrs. Kent wouldn't let him smoke cigars because the curtains were all new, so he was pretty soon off upstairs again.” Her voice softened as she hurried on, and Beatrice thought better of the young men for inspiring such affection.

She remembered her father and the fierce loyalty he had commanded in the many servants who had looked after the two of them. How sweet, and yet how bitter the many partings. How many times had she been pillowed against the bosom of a sobbing housekeeper who had stroked her hair and begged her to write? Once they had taken a maid with them, to Italy, and the maid had been almost prostrate with grief at letting them down, but found it impossible to accustom herself to foreign parts. Beatrice could summon, too easily, the cold railway platform, the tearstained face of the maid in the train window, and herself, a thin child, controlling a wave of shivers and resolving to keep the next maid at more of a distance. Each kind servant—and they were all employed by her father for their kindness rather than for any great skills in cleaning or cooking, it seemed—was held a little more distant than the last, until she could look now at Agatha Kent's maid with a completely dispassionate appraisal.

The breathless girl was struggling to remain haughty. No doubt the servants all knew Beatrice was a schoolteacher, and it was a funny thing about those in service, thought Beatrice, that they could be as rude as revolutionaries to those just above them while remaining unconditionally loyal to their masters. The girl was clearly friendly at heart, a stout worker, and had a local accent that probably made her suffer the condescension of others. Beatrice gave her a broad smile.

“Thank you for being so kind, Jenny,” she said.

“I'll fetch you some supper up right away,” said the girl. She smiled back, and no trace of haughtiness remained.

Coming downstairs in a fresh blouse and a shawl, Beatrice met Daniel crossing the entrance hall.

“Ah, wait here one minute and I'll ask Aunt Agatha where she wants you,” he said, disappearing through the living room doors.

Beatrice paused on the bottom stair, gripping the banister until her wrist ached. She murmured, very fast, “Humiliation is the sport of the petty,” an admonition of her father's that she had found all too useful this past year.

“Shall I put the schoolteacher in the small study?” she heard Daniel ask.

“Oh, heavens no, there's no fire in there and it's distinctly chilly after dark. Ask her to come in here.”

Daniel appeared in the doorway, a frown marring his classical features, and waved at her. “In here, miss. Don't be shy, we're very informal.”

“I assure you I was not raised to be shy,” said Beatrice, her voice sharp. “A country living room holds no terrors for me.”

“Do you hear that, Aunt?” said Daniel. “Not everyone is terrified of you.”

“I should hope not,” said Agatha, reclining in one corner of an overstuffed sofa. “Why, I am the mildest mannered of women and I get on with everyone.”

Hugh, sitting in a wing chair by the fireplace, seemed to choke on his own laughter and took a swig from his glass as he got to his feet.

“See, even Hugh will tell you my aunt is a most formidable woman.” Daniel smiled at Beatrice, but she was now immune to his charms, inoculated by his casual arrogance.

“You boys are very rude,” said Agatha. “Why don't you offer Miss Nash a drink, Daniel? Do come and sit by me, Miss Nash.”

“Nothing for me, thank you,” said Beatrice, who would have loved a small glass of port but knew better than to ask. It had taken several weeks for Lady Marbely to stop commenting on how unusual it was for a lady to be so knowledgeable about port and how sad it was that she had had no mother to counteract her father's more unusual ideas about what was suitable.

“Did you have enough to eat?” asked Agatha. “I can ring for some fruit.”

“No thank you, the supper was lovely, and my room is very comfortable. It is so nice of you to have me.”

“Well, I think it's important that we get to know each other, preferably before the rest of the town. We have important work to do, Miss Nash, and it is vital that you and I understand each other completely.”

“I think that's our signal to leave,” said Daniel. “Hugh and I will go have that game of billiards now.”

“Hugh must talk to you about the tutoring,” said Agatha, as the young men left the room.

“Tutoring?”

“Some local boys, protégés of mine. I told him you were looking for some private tutoring over the summer, and he was very pleased to pass them on to you. Nothing too taxing is involved—just a little help in the more advanced Latin.”

“I should be honored,” said Beatrice. “I tutored the three daughters of a professor at our California university, and it was fascinating to watch how Latin blossomed among such a small and eager group.”

“I'm not sure the boys are such blossoms,” said Agatha, giving her a doubtful look. “Hugh agrees they are bright boys, and one in particular may prove our efforts worthwhile, but they are somewhat rowdy and defiant.”

“Sometimes the hardest challenges are most deserving of our efforts,” said Beatrice. “I am very grateful to you and the school for giving me the opportunity.”

“Yes, well, we must make sure the school governors have no grounds to cause you trouble.” She hesitated, and Beatrice watched her struggle to go on.

“They did not want to employ me,” said Beatrice. She did not ask it as a question.

“Well, not exactly,” said Agatha. “But they will come around as long as you succeed.” She paused. “I am one of only two women on the Board of Governors, you know. I am in a very delicate position, in which I must temper my impatience for reform and choose my battles with care. We have women teachers, of course, to teach appropriate subjects. But in this case, we had some difficulty in finding a suitable replacement for the head Latin master, who left us so abruptly, and your qualifications so exceeded the usual applicant that I—well, I did all within my power to push your consideration.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, you are not quite what I expected,” she added. She did not elaborate, and Beatrice, under the pressure of the silence, tried to breathe in a slow way that might suppress any flush in her cheeks.

“I assure you my university and teaching certificates are quite in order,” she said finally.

“Your qualifications, and Lady Marbely's description of your wide travels and experience, suggested someone older,” said Agatha.

“I put away the fripperies of girlhood some years ago,” said Beatrice. “I have served as my father's secretary and constant companion for many years. But more to the point, I do not have the luxury of waiting around to mature like a cheese.” She smiled to soften the rebuke. “I do not intend to marry, Mrs. Kent, and now that my father is gone I must earn my bread. Surely you would not deny me the work for which I have studied and trained?”

“I would not,” said Agatha. “But let's not mention any such awkward necessity. I think we should rely on your connection to the Marbelys, and to the suggestion of teaching as service rather than profession, to carry the day.”

“As you wish,” said Beatrice, trying to keep the dryness out of her tone as she wondered how to ask about her wages and accommodations if she was not allowed to appear in need of either.

“Of course, I was older than you when I married my husband,” said Agatha. She did not phrase it as a question, and so Beatrice, who was tired of people feeling free to interrogate her on her determination to live free of a husband, bit her lip and did not answer. Agatha gave a sigh and continued. “The world is changing, Miss Nash, but very slowly. I hope that through the work I do, and the work you will do, we may further the causes of intelligence and merit and move our nation forward.”

“Mrs. Kent, am I to suppose that you support the cause of women?” said Beatrice.

“Good heavens, no!” said Agatha. “Such hysteria in the streets is impossibly damaging. It is only through such sober activities as school boards and good works, done under the guidance of our most respected and educated gentlemen, that we will prove our worth in the eyes of God and our fellow man. Don't you agree, Miss Nash?”

Beatrice was not at all sure she did agree. She rather thought she might like to vote and to have been admitted to a university degree at Oxford, her father's alma mater. Even the most educated of gentlemen seemed disinclined to remedy such injustices to women without being confronted. She was not sure that Agatha Kent was in earnest either. The face, under an arched eyebrow, was inscrutable.