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.
To my parents, Alan and Margaret Phillips
When World War I ended at 11 A.M. on November 11, 1918, many young poets, including Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, had died for their country. The work of the war poets is as enduring a remembrance of the conflict as the red poppy…
Writers and poets are at the heart of my novel, and it is perhaps no accident that the most renowned Sussex-and Kent-connected authors, who inhabited a special shelf in the Rye bookshop when I was young, all lived in this time period: Henry James, E. F. Benson, Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West, Rudyard Kipling, and Virginia Woolf. Edith Wharton was also on the shelf, as she would regularly visit Rye to take her friend Henry James out in her large car. Alas, the bookshop is gone, as are the used book dealers where I spent my Saturday job money on dusty hardcovers of these authors’ books, but their work and lives continue to inspire me.