The Summer Before the War (32 page)

“I'll just put the tea right here, madam,” said Cook, not phrasing it as a question. She dumped the loaded tray with a clatter on a low table without regard for the papers and magazines strewn across the surface. “Now you be sure and try the blackberry tarts, miss, they just come out of the oven.” With that both servants bustled loudly from the room and Beatrice was left alone to face her reluctant hostess.

Agatha was tucked among pillows on the window seat of her porch, wearing the wrapper she had once loaned to Beatrice. Her hair was casually pulled into a loose braid and her legs were bare, her feet tucked into a pair of soft embroidered slippers. Periodicals and newspapers lay on the seat and had slipped or been tossed onto the floor. A pair of stockings on a chair back and a comb left on the table suggested an incongruous air of carelessness. Agatha raised a quizzical eyebrow, but her face stayed slack and she could not seem to find the energy to speak.

“I'm so sorry to intrude,” said Beatrice. “I came to bring you the committee minutes and your staff seemed to think you might be in need of cheerful company?”

“Cheerful company is as welcome to melancholy as lemon juice on a burn,” said Agatha. “But if you promise not to smile and prattle at me, you may stay and pour the tea. I fear I have not even the energy to lift the teapot this afternoon.”

“Are you unwell?” asked Beatrice, pouring tea. “You seem”—she looked around the room again—“not quite yourself?”

“You'll forgive my appearance, I hope,” said Agatha, smoothing her hair. “I was not aware I was entertaining.” She accepted a cup of tea and leaned to close her eyes and inhale the fragrant steam of the cup. “I am indeed not myself these days. But who can be in these dreadful times?”

“We missed you at the committee meeting,” said Beatrice. “Lady Emily cannot control her disdain for Mrs. Fothergill in your absence.”

“I had the vague sort of hope that if I curled up in here, it all might stop,” said Agatha, “as if it were a bad dream.”

“Did you mean to will Mrs. Fothergill out of existence?” asked Beatrice. “I would have enjoyed seeing her disappear from the committee room in a puff of smoke.”

“I mean the war, of course,” said Agatha. “It is a bad dream, is it not? We are all so caught up in the work of it and the excitement and the urge to do important things, and we have not stopped to see the true nature of it.”

“Celeste and I enjoyed a lovely tea at Amberleigh de Witte's cottage,” said Beatrice, hoping to shock Agatha Kent into some rebuke. Agatha was a compass by which Beatrice had set her course, and this pale, lethargic creature with the strange ideas seemed to have stolen her mind.

“I have been reading over my periodicals,” said Agatha, not appearing to hear her. She balanced her saucer on the bench beside her and picked up a copy of the weekly
Gentlewoman
. “I had not noticed, you see, how the war has slipped into our lives.” She began to turn the pages slowly in her lap. “I always liked the social column, the engagements and marriages, such cheerful news of our brightest young things starting their lives…”

“At my aunt's house I always read the Positions Available for governesses and parlor maids,” said Beatrice, offering Agatha the small plate of finger sandwiches. “Not that I planned a career as a parlor maid, but it was reassuring to see that one might manage in a pinch.”

“At first it was just the King canceling the visit to Cowes,” said Agatha, referring to the August sailing regatta. She waved away the sandwiches. “Then it was the military commissions added to the names in the notices…‘Second Lieutenant Viscount Lindsey, of the King's Own, is happy to report his engagement to…' and so on.” She paused, and as she sighed she seemed to slowly deflate into the cushions that supported her. “Then the cancellations…‘The Viscount and his fiancée were to have been married at St. George's Parish Church…' First just one or two amid the weddings, then more canceled than announced. And now the lists run with the names of all the finest young men of Britain, their deaths announced in place of their marriages, their lives ended before they can begin.”

“It is awful,” said Beatrice. “I expect some very ancient families will lose their heirs and their family lines be cut off on both sides of the conflict.”

“If the scions of the greatest families are not protected, it makes it very clear to me that mothers everywhere are to lose their sons.” She turned her head away and raised a hand to pinch her nose as if to keep tears from coming. Beatrice was silent. Outside, the trees tossed their heads and tapped their branches on the windows, the sun danced on the lawns below, and in the distance the sea glittered; nature seemed for a moment to mock man's frailty with its permanence.

“You must be worried about your nephew Hugh?” said Beatrice. As she said it, she felt a moment of pain, as if Agatha's worries were contagious. She remembered Mr. Tillingham's grave premonitions and felt a rising concern that Hugh was as likely to be in danger as anyone. “But won't the doctors be far behind the lines?” she asked and was surprised to find a catch in her throat.

“With Hugh's skills, we expect him to be in a base hospital or no closer than a clearing station,” said Agatha. “It's still very dangerous, but he's so sensible and we are very proud of him.” She was weeping now, even as she spoke in a measured tone. Tears trickled down the folds beside her cheeks and dripped from her chin. She did not seem to feel them.

“What can I do for you?” said Beatrice. She went to sink on her knees at Agatha's side and put her arms around her. She was bewildered to see the strength gone from a woman on whom she now depended. Self-interest and concern vied equally as she cried, “Please, please help me understand what is wrong.”

Agatha wiped the tears from her face with the backs of her hands, and then looked at them for a moment before seeming to remember that she had a handkerchief in her wrapper. She took it out and wiped her face. Finally she took a deep breath, as if to help in squeezing out her words.

“Daniel has enlisted too,” she said, her voice faint. “And he will not be a doctor but is training to be an officer, and all I can see in these pages is his name in all the announcements of the dead.” She looked Beatrice full in the face, and her tears welled again and fell unheeded.

Beatrice could not think of a reassuring reply. Unwanted tears came to her own eyes, and she blinked hard so that she might retain her composure in this moment of need for Agatha. “I'm sure training must take a long time, and perhaps the war will end sooner than we think?” she managed. She did not believe it, for Agatha's own husband had said otherwise. As Agatha nodded and clutched her hand, Beatrice knew they were both foolish to take comfort in the easy lie.

“I was so quick to push my own work and call others to rally, and so full of my own importance,” said Agatha. “It's only now I realize how easy it was to do so on the backs of other women's sons.”

“For Daniel's and Hugh's sake you must not fall apart,” said Beatrice. “Now that you see so clearly what is at stake, your work is all the more important. You must continue to lead this town, Mrs. Kent. If you retreat, I fear for our efforts.”

“That is exactly what my husband said,” said Agatha. “But he at least got to see Daniel before he went away to enlist. They did not tell me until Daniel was gone. Why do men presume to know what is best for us?”

“Your husband is a good man” was all Beatrice could say, though she was thinking of how her own father had put her money in trust and neglected even to tell her, and how he had allowed her to believe in her own independence, but at the end had treated her as a helpless woman. Such instincts, she realized now, might be ingrained in even the best of men.

“No doubt he feared that I would become impossibly self-indulgent and make a scene,” said Agatha. She sighed again, but some color came back into her cheeks and she sat up. “As I believe I have been doing these last few days, foolishly thinking I could just withdraw from the world and make it go away.”

“I'm sure it would be a relief to Mr. Kent to know you were up and about again,” said Beatrice. “You are our center.”

“I'm not sure where to start,” said Agatha. She looked around her little room and grimaced, as if seeing the disarray for the first time. Beatrice thought a bath and a good hair brushing might be in order, but she settled for holding out a plate of cakes.

“First, have a blackberry tart,” she said. “Cook's orders.”

“Thank you for coming to pull me from my slough of despond,” said Agatha. “Now, while I eat, perhaps you can try to explain to me why our respected Latin mistress would be so careless of her reputation and mine as to visit the de Witte woman.”

The first day of
school was a relief to Beatrice. The schoolroom called to her as if it were the sweet voice of civilization itself, summoning her to the white marble halls where poetry and mathematics, painting and song all echoed together in peaceful harmony. As she descended the hill, skirted the busy railway yard, and approached the neat school with its red-tiled gables and bright window boxes, a hope swelled within her that the innocence of schoolchildren might sweep the war from her eyes on this bright September day, and from the earth tomorrow.

A large clod of grass hit her skirt as she entered the school gates, and she had a brief vision of boys throwing clods and stones and even an old shoe at one another from two sides of a hedge before a voice split the air with a high-pitched shout.

“Teacher! Leg it!” and a scrum of figures ran away towards the side of the school, keeping their faces averted and their identities undistinguishable in matching boaters and brown blazers.

“Are you all right, miss?” asked a girl in a similar brown jacket, her hair scraped back tight enough to pull the skin from her face. She held a stack of books and a hat in her hands. “I can give you all their names, miss, if you like?”

“Not at this time, but if it happens again, I may be forced to ask,” said Beatrice, frowning to discourage such easy telling of tales. The girl looked crestfallen, so Beatrice softened her gaze, brushed the dirt from her skirt with a glove, and asked, “What is your name?”

“Jane, miss,” said the girl, with enthusiasm. “Those boys are always playing war, throwing things at each other. Then if they hit someone, they call out ‘Got the Hun' and they run away like they're all on one side again. Who would want to play such a stupid game, anyway?” From this comment Beatrice understood that the girl would dearly love to be invited.

Two boys carrying long sticks across their bodies came running around the front of the building, pointing and making the sound of rifle shots at each other. Other boys, cantering on imaginary horses with wooden swords aloft, charged them from behind with bloodcurdling screams and oaths.

“Oy! No running in the front court,” said a man's voice, and Mr. Dimbly, the gymnastics master, came hurrying from the front door.

“Sorry, sir,” called one of the boys, but neither they nor the horsemen slackened their pace one bit as they all disappeared towards the tennis courts.

“Miss Nash, welcome to the second Western Front,” said Mr. Dimbly, his academic gown flying from his shoulders as he strode out to greet her. “Run along, Miss Jane. No pupils through the front door, as you know.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jane, and she hurried off to find the girls' side entrance, shoulders hunched as if under expectation of further humiliations to come.

“Hard to keep the girls in their own area before and after school,” said Mr. Dimbly. “Wouldn't do to have some girl pushed down but can't keep these boys from their war games, these days. All the excitement in the air—makes them more boisterous than usual.”

“You sound as if you almost approve, Mr. Dimbly?” said Beatrice.

“Boys who think they're soldiers try that much harder in the gymnasium,” he said. “Of course it makes it dashed hard for 'em to keep quiet in the Latin classroom, but that's not my problem anymore, is it?” He smiled in a way that took any suggestion of malice from his words.

“I shall have to hope Latin comes before gymnastics in the school day,” said Beatrice.

“Come in and I'll show you to the staff room,” he said. “We have our own stove and kettle, and sometimes the ladies among us are kind enough to bring in homemade biscuits or rock cakes, though with the war on I'm not sure we shall be as comfortably situated this term.” He had about as much guile as a puppy in his importuning of baked goods, and Beatrice could not be angry at him.

“I am sorry to report that I lack any baking skills at all, Mr. Dimbly,” she said. “However shall I hold up my head in the staff room?”

“Not to worry,” he said. “Not as if it's required—and that Miss Devon makes a rock cake that's a bit of a rock if you ask me.” He opened the heavy oak and leaded-glass front door for her, and as she passed he winked at her. “If the cupboard is bare, I'm always happy to boil an egg over a Bunsen burner, Miss Nash,” he said. “So if you get peckish, come and find me in the science room.”

“I'm sure I can wait for my dinner, Mr. Dimbly,” she said, hoping her tone was severe enough to quell any further desire on his part for flirtation.

“An army marches on its stomach, Miss Nash,” he said. “You'll soon see.”

The noise of the classroom filling with boys was not unlike the roar of a crowded theater, only at a higher pitch. How swiftly the freshly whitewashed room, with its scrubbed oak desks and clean blackboard, filled with the stench of damp wool, leather boots, and the odor of feet and armpits, steaming from the exertions of the playing fields and streets. Beatrice stood with her knuckles white from gripping the edge of her desk and tried not to recoil from the assault. After a summer of tutoring Agatha Kent's three scholarship boys, she had not expected some quiet room of pale scholars, towheaded youths bent diligently to the tutelage of Virgil, but she felt ill-prepared to meet the large group of sweating, pimply faces before her. Some were as scrawny and young as Snout, who slumped into a desk in the rear and quietly shot several boys in the neck with balls of chewed paper spit from a straw. Others seemed almost men, sporting strange tufted outcroppings of facial hair and shouting in husky voices. She had not even noticed that the girl from the front courtyard and another girl had also slipped into the room and taken desks together in the furthest back corner.

Beatrice had already cleared her throat several times and rapped her ruler against the desk for quiet, but chaos reigned until the door opened once more and a loud voice, the Headmaster's voice, shouted for quiet.

“All right, gentlemen—and ladies—anyone still talking will feel the sting of my cane and receive an hour of detention. Who's still working his mouth?” There was a collective stiffening, arms by sides, chins up, and immediate silence in the room. Beatrice, ears ringing from the chaos, could only nod her head in gratitude.

“Sit down!” said the Headmaster. There was a general slump into chairs, with some scraping of hobnails on the oak floors and a lowering of heads. The Headmaster, growling at the rows of pupils as if his eyes might bore right through any remaining recalcitrant skull, strode to the front of the room and stood between Beatrice and her pupils. “All right then,” he said. “Miss Nash is your new Latin mistress, and I expect you will show her respect. If I hear any more nonsense from Miss Nash's room, I shall be in to administer consequences. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Headmaster, sir” came the chorused reply.

“Nanos gigantium humeris insidentes,”
he declaimed, hand on heart. “Never forget your duty to those giants on whose shoulders you ride, whose words are passed down the millennia even to your unwashed and undeserving heads.”

“Yes, Headmaster, sir,” said the class in dull unison.

“Right you are then, Miss Nash,” he said in a normal, bright tone. “Welcome to Upper Form Latin. Keep their noses to the grindstone and don't be afraid to switch a few knuckles as you go.
Oderint dum metuant,
as they say.” And he swept away again, shutting the door behind him, leaving only mute cooperation in the ranks. Beatrice did not want her students to hate her, but she was grateful for the brief interlude of fear, one that even now was waning from their faces as they began to peek at her and shuffle in their seats.

“Jack, please mark the attendance,” she said in a stern voice, happy to pick on a face she knew. “Then we shall begin with a brief review of all that you learned last year.”

It sometimes seemed as if the first two weeks were a thousand days long. Beatrice could not remember the first day, nor did the Saturday half day or Sunday seem to provide any real rest. She lived in a half-light of exhaustion from the din of unruly feet kicking desk legs, the smell of boys infusing the very whitewash of the walls, and the parade of blank faces that met her whenever she turned from the blackboard with a question for a class. She did her best not to single out her tutees more than necessary, but from their stony expressions, she knew she had caused them unwanted attention. Her most egregious mistake was to call on Snout to recite what was, as she informed the whole class, his favorite passage from Virgil, Aeneas rescuing his father from the flames of Troy. Snout had given her a look of utter betrayal and resorted to spilling his inkpot over the entire book to distract from his humiliation. Coming to her senses, Beatrice ordered him to the Headmaster's office, and he went, winking at the laughter and cheers of his classmates.

In the evenings, she ate her supper in a profound silence, trying not to fall asleep in her plate, and apologized nightly to poor Celeste, who would reply in a concerned whisper. Each day Beatrice hoped to wake refreshed and hardened to her new position, but she felt she was slowly sinking under the onslaught of children, who were silent only when asked to share in the delights of Latin.

“You look terrible,” said Mr. Dimbly on the second Saturday morning, handing her a cup of strong tea as she struggled into the staff's small room during the midmorning break.

“Just what a lady wants to hear, thank you,” she snapped, gulping the tea in the hope a burning throat would force her to wake up.

“I have something for you,” he said, and produced from the pocket of his voluminous gown a slightly warm brown egg. “Hard-boiled this morning.”

“It's awfully kind of you,” she began, waving it away.

“You need to keep up your strength,” said Miss Clauvert, who was seated by the stove with her friend Miss Devon. Both had set aside their knitting and were nibbling on similar boiled eggs with some gusto. “My first month, I fainted on a regular basis until Mr. Dimbly here gave me his advice.” She simpered at Mr. Dimbly, who colored.

“Plenty of eggs, apples, strong tea, and a spoonful of cod liver oil twice a week,” he said gruffly. “Keeps up the strength and wards off all the pestilence and disease carried by a roomful of unwashed urchins.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dimbly,” said Beatrice. “Upon Miss Clauvert's recommendation I will take you up on your kindness.” She accepted the warm egg, cracked the shell on a chair back, and peeled the egg into the open top of the staff room's small black stove.

“I always tell him, he is a kind man and a gentleman, our Mr. Dimbly,” said Miss Clauvert, and she matched him blush for blush so that Miss Devon forgot her age and giggled at them.

“I swear by strong camphor and a small sliver of chalk once a week,” said Mr. Dobbins, the mathematics teacher, who wore a gown so old it had become a nasty gray color. Beatrice imagined him standing at his blackboard taking his time with a complex formula and absently chewing on his chalk for health purposes. “I can't eat eggs. They give me flatulence,” he added.

“Mr. Dobbins, really!” said Miss Devon.

“Sorry,” he replied, shrinking into his armchair. He put up his newspaper as a screen, and Beatrice heard him mutter, “Used to be able to speak freely in the staff room. Ought to have their own room if they don't like it.”

“When will I stop feeling utterly tired?” asked Beatrice. “I have made expeditions, I have hiked mountains…”

“These pupils, they are very tiresome or tiring—how do you say it, Miss Devon?” said Miss Clauvert.

“I think you mean both,” said Miss Devon. “They'll try to wear you down, Miss Nash.”

“You 'ave to fight them with your wits,” said Miss Clauvert. “Set them the exercises impossible and watch how they will be silent.”

“Just lay about you with the ruler on a more regular basis,” said Mr. Dimbly. “Swish swat…it's good exercise for you and keeps them right up to the mark.”