‘Dogs are hardly an article of faith,’ Sylvie said.
Clarence met them at the entrance gate to the estate. The Hall itself was miles away, at the end of a long avenue of elms. The Daunts had lived there for centuries and popped up occasionally to open fêtes and bazaars and fleetingly grace the annual Christmas party in the village hall. They had their own chapel so were never seen in church, although now they were never seen at all because they had lost three sons, one after the other, to the war and had more or less retreated from the world.
It was impossible not to stare at Clarence’s tin face (‘galvanized copper’, he corrected them). They lived in terror that he would remove the mask. Did he take it off to go to bed at night? If Bridget married him would she see the horror beneath? ‘It’s not so much what’s there,’ they had overheard Bridget say to Mrs Glover, ‘as what’s not there.’
Mrs Dodds (‘Old Mother Dodds’ Bridget called her, like something from a nursery rhyme) made tea for the grown-ups, tea that Bridget later reported to be ‘as weak as lamb’s water’. Bridget liked her tea ‘strong enough for the teaspoon to stand up in it’. Neither Pamela nor Ursula could decide what lamb’s water might be but it sounded nice. Mrs Dodds gave them creamy milk, ladled from a big enamel pitcher and still warm from the Hall’s dairy. It made Ursula feel sick. ‘Lady Bountiful,’ Mrs Dodds muttered to Clarence when they handed her the jam and the sweet peas and he said, ‘Mother,’ chidingly. Mrs Dodds passed the flowers over to Bridget, who remained holding the sweet peas like a bride until Mrs Dodds said to her, ‘Put them in water, you daft girl.’
‘Cake?’ Clarence’s mother said and doled out thin slices of gingerbread that seemed as damp as her cottage. ‘It’s nice to see children,’ Mrs Dodds said, looking at Teddy as if he were a rare animal. Teddy was a steadfast little boy and was not put off his milk and cake. He had a moustache of milk and Pamela wiped it off with her handkerchief. Ursula suspected that Mrs Dodds didn’t really think it was nice to see children, indeed she suspected that on the subject of children she was in agreement with Mrs Glover. Except for Teddy, of course. Everyone liked Teddy. Even Maurice. Occasionally.
Mrs Dodds examined the gypsy ring newly adorning Bridget’s hand, pulling Bridget’s finger towards her as if she was pulling a wishbone. ‘Rubies and diamonds,’ she said. ‘Very fancy.’
‘Tiny stones,’ Bridget said defensively. ‘Just a trinket really.’
The girls helped Bridget wash the tea things and left Teddy to fend for himself with Mrs Dodds. They washed up in a big stone sink in the scullery that had a pump instead of a tap. Bridget said that when she was a girl ‘in County Kilkenny’ they had to walk to a well to get water. She arranged the sweet peas prettily in an old Dundee marmalade jar and left it on the wooden draining board. When they had dried the crockery with one of Mrs Dodds’s thin, worn tea-towels (damp, of course), Clarence asked them if they would like to go over to the Hall to see the walled garden. ‘You should stop going back over there, son,’ Mrs Dodds said to him, ‘it only upsets you.’
They entered via an old wooden door in a wall. The door was stiff and Bridget gave a little scream when Clarence took his shoulder to it and shoved it open. Ursula was expecting something wonderful – sparkling fountains and terraces, statues, walks and arbours and flowerbeds as far as the eye could see – but it wasn’t much more than an overgrown field, brambles and thistles rambling everywhere.
‘Aye, it’s a jungle,’ Clarence said. ‘This used to be the kitchen garden, twelve gardeners worked at the Hall before the war.’ Only the roses climbing on the walls were still flourishing, and the fruit trees in the orchard that were laden with fruit. Plums were rotting on the branches. Excited wasps darted everywhere. ‘They haven’t picked this year,’ Clarence said. ‘Three sons at the Hall, all dead in this bloody war. I suppose they didn’t much feel like plum pie.’
‘Tsk,’ Bridget said. ‘Language.’
There was a glasshouse with hardly any glass and inside it they could see the withered peach and apricot trees. ‘Damned shame,’ Clarence said and Bridget tsked again and said, ‘Not in front of the children,’ just like Sylvie did. ‘Everything gone to seed,’ Clarence said, ignoring her. ‘I could weep.’
‘Well, you could get your job back here at the Hall,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m sure they’d be glad. It’s not as if you can’t work just as well with …’ She hesitated and gestured vaguely in the direction of Clarence’s face.
‘I don’t want my job back,’ he said gruffly. ‘My days as some rich nob’s servant are over. I miss the garden, not the life. The garden was a thing of beauty.’
‘We could get our own little garden,’ Bridget said. ‘Or an allotment.’ Bridget seemed to spend a lot of time trying to cheer Clarence up. Ursula supposed she was rehearsing for marriage.
‘Yes, why don’t we do that?’ Clarence said, sounding grim at the prospect. He picked up a small, sour apple that had fallen early and bowled it hard overarm like a cricketer. It landed on the glasshouse and shattered one of the few remaining panes. ‘Bugger,’ Clarence said and Bridget flapped her hand at him and hissed, ‘Children.’
(‘A thing of beauty,’ Pamela said appreciatively that night, as they flannelled their faces before bed with the heavy bar of carbolic. ‘Clarence is a poet.’)
As they trailed their way home Ursula could still smell the scent of the sweet peas they had left behind in Mrs Dodds’s kitchen. It seemed an awful waste to leave them there unappreciated. By then Ursula had forgotten all about the birthday tea and was almost as surprised as Teddy when they got back to the house and found the hallway decorated with flags and bunting and a beaming Sylvie bearing a gift-wrapped present that was unmistakably a toy aeroplane.
‘Surprise,’ she said.
11 November 1918
‘SUCH A MELANCHOLY time of year,’ Sylvie said to no one in particular.
The leaves still lay thick on the lawn. The summer was a dream again. Every summer, it was beginning to seem to Ursula, was a dream. The last of the leaves were falling and the big beech was almost a skeleton. The Armistice seemed to have made Sylvie even more despondent than the war. (‘All those poor boys, gone for ever. The peace won’t bring them back.’)
They had the day off school because of the great victory and they were turned outside into the morning drizzle to play. They had new neighbours, Major and Mrs Shawcross, and they spent a good deal of the damp morning peering through gaps in the holly hedge trying to get a glimpse of the Shawcrosses’ daughters. There were no other girls their age in the neighbourhood. The Coles only had boys. They weren’t rough like Maurice, they had nice manners and were never horrible to Ursula and Pamela.
‘I think they’re playing hide-and-seek,’ Pamela reported back from the Shawcross front. Ursula tried to see through the hedge and got scratched in the face by the vicious holly. ‘I think they’re the same age as us,’ Pamela said. ‘There’s even a little one for you, Teddy.’ Teddy raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Oh.’ Teddy liked girls. Girls liked Teddy. ‘Oh, wait, there’s another one,’ Pamela said. ‘They’re multiplying.’
‘Bigger or smaller?’ Ursula asked.