Time Squared, page 18
“No!” cried Lady Anne.
“Stansfield has been killed.”
15
Eleanor and her aunt arrived at the station well before Robert’s train was due to arrive. They’d been in London ever since the Mowbrays had rushed off to Yorkshire with no plans to return for David’s show. Lady Anne was frantic about Margaret, afraid the shock would make her deliver the baby too early and they’d lose him, too. She was sure it was a boy.
Kate would come to London, of course. She wrote that Margaret was holding on so far, controlling herself admirably. Staunch: the word came to Eleanor as she read Kate’s letter, along with Stansfield’s well-known voice. “One can count on Margaret. I shall. For life, you know.” Irony wherever you turned these days. The gods may have retreated to Mount Olympus but they sat there raining down mockery.
“There he is,” her aunt said, touching Eleanor’s arm. An officer was striding into the station through the same entrance they’d taken from the street. A brief clench of the heart, yet Eleanor chiefly felt puzzled. She knew it was Robert but didn’t recognize him, or have any idea why he would be arriving from the street. He wore a weary battle-stained overcoat that drew approving glances from the few scattered families on the platform. And while the overcoat looked large, Robert didn’t seem as tall or as muscular as Eleanor remembered. Tall enough, but slimmer, and as he got closer, she saw that he’d changed.
His face was thin now, the cheekbones sharper, his grey eyes deeper with a smudge of exhaustion beneath them, despite having been home for six days. Nor had she noticed before that he had such a pretty mouth. His upper lip lacked the double peak that most people had. It was as smooth and almost as full as his lower lip, which had a slight look of stubbornness.
She focused on the lips, unable to meet his eyes. Robert was greeting them, his mouth moving, but Eleanor couldn’t take in a word. Nor did she know what she felt. Mainly fear, aware that he could be torpedoed tomorrow when he shipped back across the Channel. Daring a glance, she met his grey eyes with such a jolt that they both blushed and looked aside.
“Did you get here on an earlier train?” her aunt asked, easy and pleasant, valiantly covering the confusion.
“I walked.”
“From Kent?” her aunt asked. “When on earth did you set out? Have you had any sleep?”
“Slept rough last night,” Robert said. “I knew it would be warm enough, with the clouds. Bunking down on the good clean dirt of England.”
It wasn’t only the gods raining irony. They turned as they heard a train approach the station, its chuff and pump amplified as it drove under the Himalayan ceiling, a hollow echo bouncing back from girders lined with roosting pigeons. The screech of brakes as it pulled in scattered hundreds of birds. Such a flapping confusion of wings. Eleanor wondered if pigeons were clever enough to remember that the scatter would be repeated when a new train pulled in five minutes later.
Mrs. Crosby led them out of the station before the flood of passengers got out. She walked at a surprising clip. They soon reached the cab ranks and she told a driver to take them to the Savoy, where she liked one of the restaurants. She expected Robert was hungry—“rather famished,” he agreed—and established that his mother was well enough, back to walking, and that while of course as Eleanor’s aunt she was their chaperone “in society’s eyes,” the demand of unspecified errands meant she would leave them at the Savoy, seeing them again at David Arden’s opening.
Robert sat beside her aunt in the cab, Eleanor across from them, looking at her folded hands. She felt panicked by the thought of Mrs. Crosby leaving them alone. So far, she hadn’t been able to manage more than a few words, and while Robert answered each of her aunt’s questions thoroughly, probably too thoroughly, he had no real conversation, either. Something about enclosed spaces took away Eleanor’s breath. Enclosed spaces that rattled. She preferred walking and riding, and understood why Robert had walked from Kent. Eleanor would happily leap from the cab this minute and walk all the way to Yorkshire.
“Here you are, then,” Mrs. Crosby said, and Eleanor realized that the horses had stopped. A man in the Savoy uniform was opening the door, beaming approval at the handsome captain getting out and giving his hand to a fashionably dressed girl. (The grey-green afternoon dress and a new stunner of a hat. Eleanor did like hats.) But the doorman’s approval made her feel an object in the public eye, and she found herself clinging to the open door as her aunt said goodbye, a panicked appeal in her eyes that only made Mrs. Crosby flick her wrist below the level of the window. Off with you.
It was a marvellous change from the days when her aunt had tried to make her marry Edward Denholm. Instead, fully sanctioned by Mrs. Crosby—and without a chaperone—Eleanor found herself walking into the Savoy on Robert’s arm. In the bustle of luggage and elderly bellboys, she grew conscious of the hundreds of anonymous rooms hired out above. Of the beds. No mother would have left her there, although it would be just like her aunt to silently raise an issue and expect Eleanor to finesse it, coming back engaged.
They couldn’t see the restaurant Mrs. Crosby had recommended. Robert had to hive over to the concierge to ask for directions, but turned the wrong way as soon as they left the counter. Eleanor knew it was the wrong way but couldn’t manage to tell him. When they reached the lifts, Robert turned back in some confusion, still not seeing the restaurant and heading off in another wrong direction. A faint slick of perspiration rose on his handsome upper lip, and Eleanor felt like a croquet ball pocked around a lawn. Alice in Wonderland’s game of croquet, the hoops made of doubled-over soldiers.
Finally, a bellboy took them in hand. The restaurant proved to be a vast field of tables. Underneath a high tent-like ceiling, it was loud with prosperous gentlemen and matrons, the ladies showing off the latest fashions as if they’d never heard of the war, their husbands probably running it. At a table by himself, half hidden by a palm tree, Eleanor saw a member of the war cabinet, she couldn’t remember whom, eating his soup through mustachios he used as a sieve. She thought of the Hon. Lieutenant Newton-Pye, heir to the Earl of Grimsby, human walrus, killed this spring in France.
Robert looked thoroughly overheated by now and took off his overcoat as they stood in the entrance, drawing notice to his tunic. There was a perceptible silence, the handsome captain making people look up from their meals, the notice swiftly followed by approval, either murmurs or significant nods or doting silence from the matrons. A thin woman raised her hands, prepared to clap if anyone else did.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Robert said. Still holding his overcoat, he turned on his heel and strode out of the restaurant, forcing Eleanor to sprint to keep up with him, out of the hotel and into the Strand, where he finally stopped, taking off his hat and pushing back his hair with the heel of one hand. He gave her a look of surprising distress. “I’m sorry. I simply didn’t like the look of the place.”
“I didn’t like them liking the look of you,” she said. Robert gave her a glance that dissolved into amusement, becoming more like himself. Himself as he had been.
“If you really don’t mind,” he said. “There might be something better . . .” He gestured east along the Strand and started walking, overcoat over one arm, not offering her the other one, walking a bit more slowly but still forcing her to keep up her pace to stay beside him.
They reached Fleet Street without Robert seeing anything suitable. Not that he seemed to be looking, his eyes focused down the road. He turned north along Chancery Lane, still not seeming to see anything, soon angling northeast toward Holborn, workmen and carts and horses taking the place of the motor cars chuffing along the Strand, the smell more rural despite the brick offices crowding in on either side.
Eleanor realized Robert had forgotten about eating and probably about her. She was seeing panic, Robert a piece of shrapnel flung out of France. If any of the workmen had spoken to her as rudely as the men near Arden’s studio, Robert would have punched him. Eleanor had no idea what to do until he stopped abruptly, as if waking up, looking around and noticing a low eatery across the road with a grimy small-paned Dickensian window, the glass as thick as old bottles.
“What about that one?” he asked, entirely reasonably, as if they’d been talking all the while, considering one restaurant after the other and rejecting others before now.
“If you like,” she said, and he gave a considered nod before crossing the road and opening the door.
Cooked onions. Grease, at least not rancid. Looking around, Eleanor had an idea she’d been here before. She couldn’t imagine when, although the long low narrow wood-partitioned room probably predated Dickens, likely an ancient tavern, meaning she could have strolled in any time over the past fifteen hundred years. Set Mr. Stickley digging in the basement and he’d find a Roman goddess five feet under. (Lieutenant Stickley.) The proprietor edged forward crab-like to meet them. He was busy with a cloth, wiping one finger after the other, doing it slowly enough to make it clear that he had no use for the likes of them.
“Yes, hofficer, how can I ’elp?” he asked, his half-dozen customers either ignoring them or staring belligerently at Robert’s tunic. Eleanor wondered if this was a warren of conchies, then heard the exaggerated “hofficer” and realized that this was about rank and class. The proprietor could have said “captain” and spoken better English. Everyone recognized pips these days.
“If you’ve got a table free?” Robert asked, when obviously there were plenty.
“My boy’s over there,” the proprietor said. “And ’e don’t half like what’s going on. No more do I.”
“No more do any of us,” Robert said. “But we get on with it, don’t we?”
The clientele liked that, nods and murmurs, Robert passing a test. After his own slow nod, the proprietor flexed his chin at a table, where Robert took a seat with his back against the wall. The eatery wasn’t Dickensian, Eleanor realized, sitting down across from him. It was a trench, and now Robert was safe.
The proprietor hovered, waiting for their order. Robert said casually, “Whatever you’ve got, and plenty of it.”
The man liked that, too. “And the lidy?”
“I’ve eaten, thank you. But some coffee would be nice.”
The proprietor leaned in confidentially. “The coffee ain’t up to much,” he said, as if speaking about someone else’s establishment.
“If it’s hot?” Eleanor asked, another acceptable answer. Two mugs quickly appeared and he was right; it was dreadful. Cooked grounds. But sipping it provided another excuse not to talk, and so did the plate their proprietor soon slung in front of Robert. A fry-up, she thought it was called. Only when Robert had devoured most of it and got to the kidneys did he stop. A fastidious expression passed over his face at the sight of the kidneys and he pushed his plate away.
“I’m sorry about Stansfield,” he said, and Eleanor couldn’t help recoiling. She had to force herself to meet his eyes.
“Yes,” she said.
Something about his sister being her closest friend and they must have known each other since they were children. He sounded insincere, and Eleanor wondered if he’d seen so much death that one more didn’t matter.
“We’ve lost, Middleford has lost quite a few boys,” she said. Poor Mrs. Flodden, hoping that being in the Red Cross would get her Bob through. “But I knew Stansfield all my life, and it’s difficult. Far worse for his family, of course. His poor mother. Although Stansfield’s commanding officer was kind enough to write. Apparently he died instantly of a head wound.”
The faintest movement of Robert’s handsome mouth, although he nodded gravely. Eleanor couldn’t have felt more naïve. The mother of every boy killed on the western front was probably told he’d died of a head wound, without pain, instantly, or perhaps with a final prayer on his lips that would take him directly . . .
“What really happened? Do you know?”
Robert sat back, clearly sorry he’d brought it up, not wanting to have this conversation. But there was a core honesty about him, and he had to tell her, “I heard he’d been killed not long before I left France, and I knew my brother would want me to look into it. They’d gone to school together, as I’m sure you remember.”
“I don’t think I ever knew how they’d met. They seemed unlikely friends.”
“Mowbray was someone to count on. My brother always thought of himself as someone who wasn’t. Each supplied what the other lacked.” A brief glance. “That might have changed. In Edward, I mean.”
Eleanor didn’t want to talk about Edward. “I remember thinking that Stansfield would make an excellent officer. He needed to be active.”
“Not always advisable,” Robert said, before checking himself. “I’m sure he was, but I’m afraid that’s no guarantee of getting through. I think we should find another subject, if you don’t mind.”
He tried to come up with something and couldn’t. Eleanor waited him out, not sure she wanted to hear it any more than he wanted to say it.
“He was wounded leading an assault on a machine gun position,” Robert said finally, giving in and resenting it. “It wasn’t a head wound. Abdomen. They aim for that. Bigger target. We do the same. But the stretcher-bearers got him out alive, and he was in an ambulance on his way to hospital when the ambulance had a smash-up. The driver thought he could skirt a shell hole in the road, or thought it wasn’t all that deep. The water covers that up, you see. So in he went, and Mowbray wasn’t in good enough shape to escape a second . . . insult, I believe the medical types call it. Not that he was likely to have made it anyway.”
When Eleanor was silent, fighting tears, Robert said aggressively, “You wanted to know.”
“Did you?” Eleanor asked. “I imagine you’ve seen far worse. But I mean, when you decided to go in for the army, did you want to know these things?” Finding her handkerchief but only able to crush it. “That’s a serious question.”
“Do you mean am I a damned bloodthirsty . . .”
“No. But do men, going off to war, do, do, they think it’s going to be edifying? Do they want to know? Find their purpose in life? Their role? That’s a serious question. I remember you writing after the Marne about the exhilaration of being tested in battle.”
“Do I look exhilarated, Eleanor?”
Eleanor, not Nora. He spoke gently, but there was dislike in his eyes, not necessarily directed at her, or not all of it. She allowed herself a moment.
“You’re not there,” she said. “You’re back home, and I can see that we must strike you as naïve. Absurdly so. People keep telling me”—doing an exaggerated Elizabeth Mortlake—“‘The boys want sweet little girls to, to, come home to.’” Blushing, but determined to go on. “You told me once yourself that in fighting for England, you felt you were fighting for people like me. You felt a need to protect us. But I wonder when it comes down to it if we’re irrelevant, if not awfully boring or, or as repulsive as you found the Savoy. What’s important is the exhilaration you feel facing the ultimate. To know. The very height of life. I keep wondering if that’s what men really want. If it’s why you keep agreeing to fight, generation after generation after . . . Stansfield rushing to learn.”
“If that’s what you’ve come up with, I wouldn’t call you naïve.”
Robert stood up abruptly, throwing some money on the table and taking his hat and his overcoat. Eleanor wondered if he was going to leave her here. He seemed capable of it.
“I don’t imagine you want any more coffee,” he said.
Eleanor stood up, still wearing a hat that suddenly struck her as ridiculous, and Robert offered his arm to walk her past the crab-like proprietor and out of the trench, leaving her unable to predict anything that was going to happen between them.
* * *
Robert stopped outside the eatery. Without Mrs. Crosby, neither of them had any idea what to do next. Eleanor got stuck when she remembered she needed new stockings, unable to get the stockings out of her head, and the fact it was impossible to take Robert shopping. They shuffled in place, darting glances at each other like schoolchildren with a mutually embarrassing pash.
Just at the edge of Eleanor’s understanding was what soldiers wanted when left so improperly alone with their girls, if that’s who she was; what mothers warned they wanted; what Robert might have had in mind all along without, she half suspected, knowing how to get it from someone like her, even in a hotel, or especially in a hotel, which had panicked him. It simply wasn’t done with a respectable girl, trusted by her aunt; certainly not with a girl who didn’t know how to go about helping him even if she could work out whether she wanted to or not.
She wanted to. Robert would be back at the front in days, where he could die in an instant. Eleanor felt half inside her dream of the African savannah, wading through the waist-high grass, Robert beside her, arm around her, bending down to kiss her, his steady grey eyes reflecting back the golden grass and sun. Gold and grey, colours that spoke to each other. A yawning lion. Humidity that drenched her.
Not that she could have answered if someone had asked whether she loved Robert. If they asked who he was. Who she was and what on earth she was doing here.
Yes, she loved him. She didn’t know why but she did and it terrified her. What she might lose without ever having it. What she might be better off losing before she learned the value of what she’d lost.
“I wonder if we might try the National Gallery?” she asked in a panic. “I thought . . . since we’re having an artistic day.”
“Are we?” Robert asked humorously, in his eyes an acknowledgment of all this. Regret? And something else you saw in men’s eyes, more elemental. But he didn’t push, although she wished he had, instead turning and setting off. It was a long walk to Trafalgar Square and maybe that was the attraction. Ahead he marched, keeping his eye on the invisible horizon. Eleanor knew now that he was marching. Not even when they turned the corner around St. Martin’s in the Field did he pause to glance up at the clock—near 2 p.m.—and wonder, as she did, how they were going to fill the remaining three hours until David’s opening. How to fill them without ruining everything.
