‘He’s learning the violin, isn’t he – Simon?’ Sylvie said. ‘Jews are usually very musical, aren’t they? Perhaps I could give him some sheet music, something like that.’ This discussion of the perils of offending Judaism had taken place around the breakfast table. Hugh always looked vaguely startled to find his children at the same table as him. He hadn’t eaten breakfast with his parents until he was twelve years old and deemed fit to leave the nursery. He was the robust graduate of an efficient nanny, a household within a household in Hampstead. The infant Sylvie, on the other hand, had dined late, on Canard à la presse, perched precariously on cushions, lulled by flickering candles and twinkling silverware, while her parents’ conversation floated above her head. It was not, she now suspected, an entirely regular childhood.
Old Tom was double-digging a trench, he said, for a new asparagus bed. Hugh had long since abandoned Wisden and had been picking raspberries to fill a big white enamel bowl that both Pamela and Ursula recognized as the one that Maurice had until recently been keeping tadpoles in, although neither of them mentioned this fact. Pouring himself a glass of beer, Hugh said, ‘Thirsty work, this agricultural labour,’ and they all laughed. Except for Old Tom.
Mrs Glover came out to demand that Old Tom dig up some potatoes to go with her beef collops. She huffed and puffed at the sight of the rabbits, ‘Not enough even for a stew.’ Pamela screamed and had to be calmed down with a sip of Hugh’s beer.
Pamela and Ursula made a nest, in a lost corner of the garden, out of grass and cotton wool, decorated with fallen rose petals, and carefully placed the baby rabbits in it. Pamela sang them a lullaby, she could keep a tune nicely, but they had been asleep ever since George Glover had handed them over.
‘I think they might be too small,’ Sylvie said. Too small for what? Ursula wondered but Sylvie didn’t say.
They sat on the lawn and ate the raspberries with cream and sugar. Hugh looked up into the blue, blue sky and said, ‘Did you hear that thunder? There’s going to be a tremendous storm, I can feel it coming. Can’t you, Old Tom?’ he raised his voice so that Old Tom, far away in the vegetable bed, could hear. Hugh believed that, as a gardener, Old Tom must know about weather. Old Tom said nothing and carried on digging.
‘He’s deaf,’ Hugh said.
‘No, he isn’t,’ Sylvie said, making a Rose Madder by mashing raspberries, beautiful like blood, into thick cream, and she thought, unexpectedly, about George Glover. A son of the soil. His strong square hands, his beautiful dappled greys, like big rocking horses, and the way he had lolled on the grassy bank eating his lunch, posed rather like Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel but reaching for another slice of pork pie rather than the hand of his Creator. (When Sylvie had accompanied her father, Llewellyn, to Italy she had been astonished by the amount of male flesh available to view as art.) She imagined feeding George Glover apples from her hand and laughed.
‘What?’ Hugh said and Sylvie said, ‘What a handsome boy George Glover is.’
‘He must be adopted then,’ Hugh said.
In bed that night Sylvie abandoned Forster for less cerebral pursuits, entwining overheated limbs in the marital bed, more a panting hart than a soaring lark. She found herself thinking not of Hugh’s smooth, wiry body but of the great burnished centaureal limbs of George Glover. ‘You’re very …’ a spent Hugh said, gazing at the bedroom cornice as he searched for an appropriate word. ‘Lively,’ he concluded finally.
‘It must be all that fresh air,’ Sylvie said.
Golden and kissed by the sun, she thought as she drifted comfortably off to sleep and then Shakespeare came unwontedly to mind. Golden lads and girls all must, / as chimney-sweepers, come to dust, and she felt suddenly afraid.
‘There’s the storm rolling in at last,’ Hugh said. ‘Shall I turn out the light?’
Sylvie and Hugh were ejected from their Sunday-morning slumber by a wailing Pamela. She and Ursula had woken early with excitement and rushed outside to find that the rabbits had disappeared, only the fluffy pom-pom of one tiny tail remaining, white smudged with red.
‘Foxes,’ Mrs Glover said, with some satisfaction. ‘What did you expect?’
January 1915
‘DID YOU HEAR the latest news?’ Bridget asked.
Sylvie sighed and put down the letter from Hugh, its pages as brittle as dead leaves. It was only a matter of months since he had left for the Front yet she could hardly remember being married to him any more. Hugh was a captain in the Ox and Bucks. Last summer he was a banker. It seemed absurd.
His letters were cheerful and guarded (the men are wonderful, they have such character). He used to mention these men by name (‘Bert’, ‘Alfred’, ‘Wilfred’) but since the Battle of Ypres they had become simply ‘men’ and Sylvie wondered if Bert and Alfred and Wilfred were dead. Hugh never mentioned death or dying, it was as if they were away on a jaunt, a picnic (An awful lot of rain this week. Mud everywhere. Hope you are enjoying better weather than we are!).
‘To war? You are going to war?’ she had shouted at him when he enlisted and it struck her that she had never shouted at him before. Perhaps she should have.
If there was to be a war, Hugh explained to her, he didn’t want to look back and know that he had missed it, that others had stepped forward for their country’s honour and he had not. ‘It may be the only adventure I ever have,’ he said.
‘Adventure?’ she echoed in disbelief. ‘What about your children, what about your wife?’
‘But it’s for you that I am doing this,’ he said, looking exquisitely pained, a misunderstood Theseus. Sylvie disliked him intensely in that moment. ‘To protect hearth and home,’ he persisted. ‘To defend everything we believe in.’
‘And yet I heard the word adventure,’ Sylvie said, turning her back on him.
Nonetheless, she had, of course, gone up to London to see him off. They had been jostled by an enormous flag-waving throng who were cheering as if a great victory had already been won. Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?
Hugh had held her close to him as if they were new sweethearts and only jumped on the train at the very last moment. He was instantly swallowed by the crush of uniformed men. His regiment, she thought. How odd. Like the crowd, he had seemed immensely, stupidly cheerful.
When the train began to heave itself slowly out of the station the excitable crowd roared their approval, frantically waving their flags and throwing caps and hats in the air. Sylvie could only stare blindly at the carriage windows as they passed by, first slowly and then more and more rapidly until they were no more than a blur. She could see no sign of Hugh, nor, she supposed, could he see her.
She remained on the platform after everyone else had left, staring at the spot on the horizon where the train had disappeared.