The Summer Before the War (51 page)

“Do you hear the lark?” she asked. A trembling song rose and fell above the grass, a sound he might have missed against the ring of horseshoes on the road. “They will be thick in the air again, when summer comes. An
exaltation
of larks, they call it.”

“I will be home again,” he said. “We shall lie on our backs in the fields and count birds.”

“I don't think trying to count them is quite in the exalting spirit,” she said, and though she smiled her chin trembled for the sadness of the day.

At the shore, they climbed hand in hand across the dunes to find Mrs. Stokes's family and friends gathered on the beach below. Aunt Agatha, Uncle John, and Celeste stood with Abigail on the edge of the crowd, and his uncle carried a small bundle in his arms. Hugh had helped him collect the items this afternoon: a book of Longfellow, much written in the margins and stained with the wine and late-night suppers of a college poet; a favorite velvet smoking jacket patched at the elbows and frayed at the sleeves; his army cap, which Hugh had carried home. They had not included any of Daniel's poetry, it being valuable to the wider world, they hoped, but Aunt Agatha had sacrificed a precious cardboard folder filled with Daniel's childhood writings. They were gathered to say goodbye to Richard Sidley in private, away from the prying eyes of the town, and Mrs. Stokes had honored Hugh's aunt and uncle by including them in the ritual.

Uncle John stepped forward to climb the wooden steps of Maria Stokes's caravan and place his bundle inside the open door next to her great-grandson's small collection of clothes and possessions. Abigail then ran to add the precious jar of coins, and her father took a basket of sweet herbs and wildflowers from his wife and tucked it inside.

“He was my son,” said Snout's father. “He was a scholar and a soldier and a good son to his mother.” He took a brand from the fire and held it high. “And underneath he was one of us, a proud Romany man.” He tossed the brand inside, and the caravan, fresh with paint, caught like a torch and was soon consumed in a ball of fire and smoke. The smoke, in defiance of the war, climbed high into the sky, and the caravan burned like a beacon. Men with a violin and accordion set to playing a low, wailing tune. And so they stood, as the light drained from the sky behind the town of Rye, and the crescent moon grew brighter in the east; and the ceaseless waves ignored the small rituals of mankind to run up on the shore and withdraw again, under the strange regular hand of gravity.

“Come with me,” he said, “and I will show you where your son lies.”

R
UDYARD
K
IPLING
, “The Gardener”

In the high summer
of 1920, Beatrice and Hugh accompanied Aunt Agatha to the Continent. The fields of northern France and Flanders had already grown new coats of grass and hay to cover the mutilated nakedness of the battlefields. The first new crops had been planted in the less damaged areas, and red poppies nodded again in fields of wheat. All the hotels and guesthouses were full and festively decorated with fluttering pennants and bright awnings, and ladies dined under the awnings in the breezy, loose-fitting dresses that celebrated a new, more liberal era.

It was all the rage to visit the dead, scattered over the countryside in small-town cemeteries or patches of woodland, or often in what had been a field outside a clearing station. There was to be no repatriation of bodies. Instead, dignified new cemeteries were planned. In London, as in Rye, the talk was of new guidebooks and of finding just the perfect little
pension,
from which to tour the battlefields.

“Vieux Jacques and his wife took such care of us at Pension Michel,” Bettina Fothergill had repeated around town. Her only nephew, Charles Poot, had managed to acquire a government post in London and so sit out the war in comfort, but she had been to visit the grave of her husband's cousin's nephew, several times removed, and made up for her lack of proximity to sacrifice by asserting herself as an expert on the logistics of the visit. Beatrice noticed that those who had lost more were quieter about their pilgrimages, slipping away unannounced and coming back with a photograph of the grave site taken by some enterprising local photographer. Now that she was in France, she had more sympathy for the opportunistic locals, with their photographic services and their shrapnel souvenirs, and their farms turned into makeshift
pensions
—for in the shattered lands, it was still a scramble to make a living and feed a family through the winter.

Hugh left his patients to the retired Dr. Lawton, whose practice he had taken on. Some grumblings were to be heard around Rye, for though they admired the decorated young surgeon who had chosen to give up his London ambitions to live as a quiet country doctor, they were selfish beings and were inconvenienced by his taking his young wife away for a much delayed July holiday. Beatrice had been kept on at the school through the end of the war, teachers being in short supply, but as a married woman she was gently sent home at the armistice. She devoted most of her time to her writing now. Her small edition of Daniel Bookham's poems, with a gentle introduction extolling his passion for platonic ideals and his two great loves, for his friend and for his wife, was well received and took its place amid the many volumes of poetry from poets who now lay beneath the fields of the Continent. She was also working on her novel, having received a small advance from her father's publisher in gratitude for her work on Tillingham's book. Uncle John had not accompanied them to France. Troubled with sciatica these days, he stayed behind with Celeste, who had become too much like a daughter, and her small son a grandson, to let her leave England when her father hurried away at the end of the war.

Beatrice rose early this morning, as was her routine, and sat by the window of their room at the
pension
to try to write a few lines. But she found her attention torn between the splendor of the morning light on the fields and the splendor of her young husband, lying sprawled in a tangle of sheets. She could not have imagined how marriage would enlarge and perfect the other pleasures of her life. To share books, to talk over one's work, to write letters, and to see life reflected in another's eyes had brought a deep sense of satisfaction. Under her happiness ran a thin vein of sorrow that millions like her would feel down the years. It did not stop their feet from walking, or prevent the quotidian routines of life; but it ran in the population like the copper wires of the telephone system, connecting them all to each other and to the tragedy that had ripped at their hearts just as it had ripped at the fields outside her window.

Thanks to the influence of Uncle John and Mr. Tillingham, Daniel had been among the first to be moved from his makeshift wartime grave and laid to rest in one of the new, experimental cemeteries, not yet finished. Mr. Tillingham had arranged for them to visit privately and would meet them at breakfast. He had capitalized on his refugee work to claim a position on the Imperial War Graves Commission, where he joined the literary voices among a group of cemetery designers that included Britain's finest architects, landscape designers, and engineers. A knighthood was the very least he hoped for from his labors. He was spending much of the summer in the area, where he could shuffle among the plots, providing daily supervision of the work and expanding his influence beyond anything asked of him.

Agatha was already at breakfast when Beatrice and Hugh came down. A plate of poached eggs and fruit sat untouched before her. She was drinking a cup of tea, holding the cup in both hands, paused as if lost in the chattering of the sparrows in the flowering window box.

“Good morning, Aunt,” said Hugh, and he kissed her cheek. She closed her eyes at his touch. It seemed to Beatrice that Hugh's presence brought Agatha great joy and great pain all at once, and she feared that his aunt might never see him without the ghost of his cousin standing at his shoulder.

“Good morning, all,” said Mr. Tillingham, entering the breakfast room with the expansive cheer of a monarch sweeping to the throne. The old waiter bowed, and the kitchen girl rushed in with his thick toast and his soft-boiled egg; he was a regular and a procurer of many guests, and they leaped to his every need. “A fine day for it, no doubt,” he continued. “We will keep the gate locked until you are done, dear lady, but we should get an early start.” So saying, he sat at table and took a great deal of time to chew his way methodically through his breakfast.

Under a blue sky, with the sound of birdsong in the poplars and a light breeze glittering through the leaves, the cemetery looked almost painfully beautiful. It was set in a plain rectangular garden wall, not so high as to hide the glory of the countryside all around. The gravestones of English Portland stone, brought from Dorset, were planted in uniform rows, on either side of straight grass paths. A cross at the gate and a monolith at the far end provided weight and spirituality. But to Beatrice's eye, the beauty lay in dozens of pink rosebushes, lying about in great heaps, and a gardener patiently planting them between the gravestones so that the dead might sleep in a pretty, tidy English garden.

They descended from the carriage, and Mr. Tillingham stopped to speak to a watchman at the gate. Hugh helped Agatha up the pathway, and they assembled on the steps of the monolithic Stone of Remembrance while the watchman went to consult the gardener about the gravestone they had come to see.

“The inscription was Kipling's choice, a little obvious perhaps,” Tillingham said, pointing to the heavy chiseled statement,
THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE
. “I told them we should remove the ‘for' as superfluous, but it being from the Bible, he and the commission were rather sticky about keeping the usual wording. Let me give you a brief overview of the meaning behind the Cross of Sacrifice and its bronze ornament…”

But Agatha Kent went forward to meet the watchman and the gardener, who were coming towards them, and they spoke to her in French and pointed halfway along the sleeping rows.

“Will you excuse us a moment?” said Hugh. “I think my aunt would like to go forward alone.” He looked to Beatrice for permission, and she gave him a smile and a nod. In proximity to grief, she was little more than a tourist compared to her husband and his aunt. She would wait patiently with Mr. Tillingham, and he would have to jingle his watch chain and peer from a distance; and they would both have to examine their own irrelevance to the story unfolding in this little garden.

As Hugh held her arm, Agatha turned left into a row and slowly, so very slowly walked along. Beatrice could tell she was reading each name, whether to defer the agony or in the hopes that such an incantation might wipe Daniel's name from the pale limestone, she could not say. But the stone was found and the sound of her single sob carried down the rows to where they stood together.

“It's always the mothers,” said the gardener.

Beatrice opened her mouth to correct him, but it was suddenly as clear to her as the blue sky above that of course he spoke the truth.

After a moment she dared to peek at Mr. Tillingham. His face was as greedy as that of a glutton before the feast. She knew then he was thinking of how to use Agatha's secret tragedy, imagining a famous story to gild his reputation and surround himself with a new aura of exquisite compassion. She did not know how he could continue to just take the souls from people he knew and mix them about on his palette like a rude painter. For now it seemed to her that all his novels were filled with people he knew and betrayed. He must have sensed her looking at him. He coughed, and shuffled his feet, and then he turned his weak gray eyes to her and said, with a half-apologetic air, “One is always careful to change the names, of course. It's only courteous.”

She walked away from him to stand and mourn alone, in a scene she knew no writer would ever capture well enough that men might cease to war: Agatha half kneeling on the grass, Hugh bending in silent grace to comfort, the milk white of the gravestones, and the pink roses vivid against the new-cropped grass. Overhead, a single lark spilled its praise into the blue dome of the sky.