Chapter 16
AFTER ALAN’S DEATH, REGI AND I TREATED EACH OTHER differently. At times more formally, overly polite and careful; other times we were too indulgent, allowing each other to say or do things that were almost hurtful, yet we pretended not to mind.
I still thought of Leo, I still wondered at what I had missed with him, although I also found myself trying to define just what it was I had found with Regi, as well. It was a way of life, I supposed; a kind, warm, safe way of life, with a gentle man who had shrunk suddenly overnight.
A life that was all about our boys, as it always had been; they were our common prayer. Alan was like a phantom limb—we could not quite reconcile ourselves to his absence, as it had always been the three boys; three little soldiers, all in a row. We thought of them rather as a matched set; the absence of one made the others look lost, not quite right, and I had to wonder if Mamma and Papa felt that way when Edith died.
Not that we saw Rex or Caryl, of course, except for one brief leave each; the war raged on through the rest of 1915, and as 1916 drew to a close there was no sign of the horrific battles abating. Conscription had been introduced, there was talk of coal shortages, and the German submarines had taken over the oceans so that we could not import food. Our household staff shrank to skeletal proportions as men went to war and women joined the Land Army or worked in munitions factories. We closed off many rooms, and Regi faithfully tended a small vegetable patch where the cutting garden had been, proudly showing me his bounty, bothering Cook about the proper way to put it all up.
Yet still we lived for our remaining sons; we wrote regularly, we prayed, we rejoiced in their precious leaves—Caryl in the summer of 1915, Rex in the early winter of 1916. Just as Alan had been, they were changed, although Caryl appeared the least affected. He persisted in telling us stories of pranks and larks—of football matches in the mud of the battlefields, where they had to be careful of undetected land mines; he did clench his jaw as he told of one fellow who simply disintegrated after kicking what he thought was the makeshift football—and he slept peacefully enough at night. No nightmares for my youngest, at least.
Rex, my Rex, my charming, frustrating, lovable boy, did not tell stories. He scarcely talked at all, he who used to speak his mind regardless of the consequences. There was a haunted look in those eyes that used to gleam so mischievously, and he could not seem to bear the quiet of the house; it wore so obviously upon his nerves. He would sit in the drawing room after dinner, jiggling his legs, playing the gramophone as loud as it could go—anything, it seemed, to stave off the quiet, and the questions. Naturally, Regi and I wanted to know about the war, how he felt it was going, but as it was obvious it grieved him to tell us, we learned not to ask.
Once I came upon him sitting in the library; he was staring out the window toward the cricket pitch, which was now brown and covered with weeds. I started toward him—his back was to me—but then stopped. He had a knife in his hand, a small penknife. As he sat, he pressed the point of that knife into the palm of one hand; small trickles of blood snaked down his wrist and dripped upon the carpet, and for once in my life I could not care. I could not move, could not speak—my entire body was frozen in fear for my son, who was sitting not three feet from me but in reality was so far away, so already lost, that I knew I could never reach him again.
He did not appear to notice the blood. Or the pain.
Shaking, I walked backward out of the library; once in the hall, I stood sentry outside the closed door, watching for Regi and the servants. I would not allow them in; I would not allow anyone to see. After Rex went to bed that night—walking past me where I stood, unsurprised to see me there, pausing only to kiss me absently on the cheek—I took a basin of water, tore my petticoat, for I had no idea where the Mary Anns kept the old rags, found some bleach in the scullery, and tried to get the blood out of the carpet myself. I did not quite succeed, so I rearranged the furniture over it.
A week later, Rex was gone back to the front; I never once spoke to him about the scars on his hand, although he never tried to hide them from me.
Cuffnells was no longer a grand country house; it was a fading relic with rooms echoing with the laughter, the parties, and the gaiety of the past. Just like Regi and me, I could imagine the servants whispering; sometimes I saw us through their eyes, two companionable old people living on memories, for to talk of the present brought far too much pain and worry.
I often found him sitting in Caryl’s room, staring out the window toward the forest, the paths where the boys had played; he often found me in Rex’s room, one of his boyhood books in my hand—Treasure Island or Black Beauty.
Neither of us spoke on these occasions. It was enough to know that each was watching out for the other.
One chilly October morning the doorbell chimed; Regi himself answered it, as he was expecting a delivery of onion bulbs and wanted to make sure the lorry took them round to the gardener’s house. What summoned me was the unnatural silence; I was upstairs in the hall, seeing to the hanging of a new portrait of Papa, when I became aware of an eerie stillness. I had heard the door chime but nothing after that; no voices, no footsteps. It was as if all the air had been driven from the house.
And in that moment, I knew.
Dropping the hammer I was holding as one of our few remaining footmen penciled in the nail hole, I walked slowly to the head of the stairs. “Regi?” I asked softly.
He was standing in the open door, a small white envelope in his hand; as I watched, he slowly took a step backward and leaned against the wall, the envelope fluttering to the ground. He said not a word. Then he looked up at me, with eyes that were just black holes of grief.
I flew down the stairs, already knowing what the telegram said—for had I not memorized the other?—the only question in my heart being, Which son was taken from us now? I had a momentary, ridiculous thought that it was up to me to choose; if a name appeared in my head, then that was the son that was lost. And to my everlasting shame, my everlasting agony, a name did appear, did whisper itself, but it was not the name on the telegram that I snatched from the ground: Regret to inform you your son Leopold Reginald Hargreaves killed in action.
I stared at it, not comprehending; no, I thought, this cannot be. Leopold is already dead; haven’t I mourned him enough?
Then realization dawned: Rex. They had taken Rex. My second son—the son of my heart, I knew it now, for certain; the son I had named for my first love. I had killed him; I had doomed him by naming him this. I knew it, I knew it even as I bent over in anguish, feeling as if someone had ripped my chest open and pulled my heart out with angry hands; there was no greater pain, no greater emptiness. Holding on to Regi, as he held on to me—without the other, we each would have fallen—I gasped and swallowed and blinked my eyes, remembering that I had to be strong; I was always the one who was strong.
But this time, I could not stop the images flooding my mind: Rex lying on the battlefield, Rex in a torn uniform—hadn’t I always scolded him for tearing his clothes? But not like this; not a uniform shredded, ripped apart by bullets. Rex with blood pouring out from his heart, his great, compassionate, seeking heart, Rex crying out for me, wondering why I could not come—You don’t chase after us—you never! You’re much too old. Although if you did, I’d most likely let you catch me, just to be nice—
Rex lying cold and still, his eyes open but not seeing, his mouth no longer moving. No longer able to call my name.
“Alice,” Regi cried out, needing me; his arms flailed about, his hands sought my comfort. But this time I could not help him; even with the footman hanging over the banister watching, I had to run from Regi, run from his grief; I felt it chasing after me as I flew down the hall, flinging myself into the library and closing the doors behind me.
Once inside, I fell to my knees, a great sob ripping my heart apart, my tears flowing freely for him. My boy, my little boy; I remembered him creeping onto my lap that day so long ago, his sturdy, warm form snug against my chest, against my heart, and I had scarcely allowed it; I had pushed him off my lap, had refused to read him that book—that wretched book! Always coming between me and those I loved! And now it was too late, oh, it was too late! I would never hold him again—how could I live one minute more with the knowledge that I could never hold him, scold him, read to him, again?
Stifling a cry, I pushed myself up onto a footstool—was it the one I had positioned over his blood?—and fixed my gaze fiercely on the mantel clock. Through my tears I watched the second hand go around and I began to count out loud—one, three, two, four—wasn’t that how Mr. Dodgson used to count? Finally I reached sixty, and I held my breath—but the pain was worse, jagged edges of glass ripping my heart apart, as the second hand continued to go around again and again; it would never stop, they would never stop coming, all the hours and days and years I would have to live without my dear boy, knowing he was in his grave, alone. Somewhere I could not be.
Suddenly there were arms about me; Regi’s arms. “My dear girl,” he whispered, gathering me into his lap, more tenderly than anyone had held me when I was a child. “My dear, dear girl, shhhh. I’m here.”
His embrace, so dear, so complete—so unexpected, but it need not have been; sobbing harder, I understood, finally, after thirty-seven years. “Oh!” I gasped, when I could at last draw a breath, fighting my way through a fresh onslaught of tears. “Oh, forgive me, forgive me! I’m so sorry!” All the times I had looked at Regi, wanting Leo instead; all the times I had imagined Leo as the father of my children, wondered what those phantom sons would have been like.
And all the time, Regi was here. Regi loved his sons. Regi loved me, as I was—there was nothing to fear, nothing to hide from him. I knew it, I knew it always—but what I did not know until this moment, this instant—
What I did not know was that I loved him, too. That was what I had found, what had been there all the time; how stupid, how selfish I had been, not to see it.
“I’m so sorry,” I said again—to Regi, to Rex, to Alan. To Caryl. “I’m so very sorry.” The tears would not stop, although they came more peacefully now; as if from a deep spring within me that had simply been waiting for this moment to overflow.
Still Regi held me, and I let him, and I wondered why I had not let him be strong for me before; as our tears mingled together, finally I felt a calmness come over me, and I was able to whisper “Thank you” to Rex.
For he had given me the gift I had been unable to give him when he had asked, curled up in my lap as I was now curled up in Regi’s, so long ago.
IT WAS CRUEL, TOO CRUEL, to lose two sons; everyone said so, yet no one could make it stop. For all over England, mothers and fathers were mourning sons, as the Battle of the Somme was raging. And there was still one more son left at the front who needed our prayers, our thoughts.
The son whose name had flashed in my mind before I opened the telegram; I could never betray this, but I knew, then, that I was no better mother than my own had been. I had always vowed I would not love any of my children less than the others, as Mamma had so obviously done. Yet when the moment came—the moment when, wildly, irrationally, I felt it was within my power to choose which son I could keep with me forever—I had discovered that I was no better than she. There is always so much talk about the sins of the fathers, but it is the sins of the mothers that are the most difficult to avoid repeating.
“Surely they’ll send Caryl back now, won’t they?” I asked Regi, who always assured me they would, no matter how many times I asked. I found myself voicing my concern for my youngest far more than I ever had for his brothers, as if to reassure myself that I wasn’t a monster, after all. Perhaps I said it often enough that someone heard it; by the end of 1916 we were able to rejoice in the knowledge that Caryl had been reassigned to England. Even if he was not under our roof, at least he was no longer in France. We could not be entirely easy of mind, though, until Armistice Day.
Peace at last—but what did it mean? There was no peace for us; on that strangely hushed, melancholy day, we went to church and prayed along with the nation. Only we sat in our pew at Lyndhurst Parish Church, beneath a memorial plaque to our two dead sons.
Alan was buried in Fleurbaix, Rex in Guillemont, each one just another grave among thousands. I never visited either but received two photographs of white crosses, presumably marking their resting places, although no one could ever know with certainty if that was where they truly lay. I took my comfort instead in visiting the plaque, and the memorial in the baptistry of the church that listed all of Lyndhurst’s fallen sons.
Although I was careful to visit it only at odd hours, when I could be alone with my thoughts; I was not just another grieving mother, and my boys were not just common fallen soldiers. I was Alice in Wonderland, and they were the lords of Cuffnells. It did not seem right that their names were listed among the sons of those who had been in service to us.
AND SO THE WAR WAS OVER. I had hoped that there would be some return to normalcy, to the life we had lived, but I was disappointed. No matter who I invited to dinner, there would always be two empty places. Three, actually; Caryl moved back to his flat in London, reluctantly coming home to Cuffnells only on odd weekends. I managed to scrape together a more sufficient staff, but barely; the housemaids were rude, bickered over their wages, and the sole footman actually smoked in the kitchen.
“What the devil are you doing?” I asked the insolent fellow, who was leaning against the stove, having just lit his cigarette from a burner.
“Havin’ a smoke,” he said, looking at his cigarette with some surprise.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh. I mean, havin’ a smoke, madam.” He shrugged and continued to puff on the horrid thing; I summoned the housekeeper, intending to dismiss him, but she informed me—while the creature simply stood there, staring at us with unconcealed, ill-mannered amusement—that he was the best we could get.
“All the good young lads are dead in France, and it’s just scoundrels like ’im left, especially for the wages being offered, not that I’m complainin’, madam, no, but you have to admit, times is tough.”
“Indeed.” I left the kitchen without acknowledging her broad hint. Christmas was coming; she’d get her extra pound.
Regi scarcely noticed my difficulties keeping the house running, although I tried desperately to involve him. As soon as the war ended, he grew old overnight, somehow older than I, although we were the same age. He was almost deaf, and prone to doddering about at his old cricket club in good weather, and simply doddering about the house in bad, following me around like a small child but never really interested in what I was doing. He harped on Caryl’s extravagances—of which I also disapproved—but other than that, he simply had no interest in the house. It was up to me to pay the bills, see about repairs; the land did not bring in much income any longer, and taxes were outrageous, so I urged him to sell several parcels.
Bit by bit, Cuffnells was diminishing, and so, to my great distress, was my husband. I worried about him, scolded him into wearing warm clothes in winter, drinking cool drinks in summer, but I could not prevent his decline. It was as if he simply decided he was a clock not worth winding any longer.
In February of 1926 he came down with a bad cold—he would insist on throwing off the muffler I tried to keep wrapped about him morning and night—and took to his bed; he was very ill but not so ill that he did not smile at the fuss I made over him.
“What’s all this?” he croaked as I sat beside him, trying to coax him into sipping a spoonful of beef broth. “Mrs. Hargreaves feeding me with her own hands?”
“Do be quiet, and eat.” I frowned down at him, trying to hide my concern; the doctor had just been, warning that Regi’s lungs were weak, and this was not merely a bad cold. Pneumonia, he thought.
“Yes, madam,” he said meekly, trying to salute me, but he could not lift his hand. Still, he smiled, pleased at my presence; tears sprang to my eyes to see how happy it made him just to have my attention, my concern. Why had I not offered him more of that over the years?
That was the moment I finally realized that Regi was the only person whom I had ever made completely happy; he was the only person who had not needed me to be someone else; someone more. Even Leo had needed me to be Alice in Wonderland, a fairy tale, a dream.
But Reginald Gervis Hargreaves, Esq., needed only me—Alice. Alice Pleasance Hargreaves; twenty-four letters now, instead of twenty-one. Sitting beside his bed, stroking his arm, I wondered who I would be without him.
I removed the soup bowl to a tray and placed my hand upon his forehead; it was clammy and cold, and his breathing was much labored. Struggling to hold him up—even though he was quite frail, he still was such a tall man; he had been so very sturdy and big-boned in his youth—I propped a few pillows behind his back so that he could breathe easier. Then I helped him back down, and in doing so, I planted a kiss upon his unshaven cheek.
“What’s the occasion, Mrs. Hargreaves?” he whispered with another sweet, simple smile.
“I do not require an occasion to kiss my husband,” I huffed—but my voice quavered, and he reached over and took my hand, and squeezed it.
He died two hours later; I was still sitting next to him, still holding his hand, when he smiled at me, whispered that he would tell the boys I sent them my love—and then he was gone. I sat for a very long time that way, watching the snow pile up outside his window, wishing I had been a better wife to him; hoping that in the end, the love I had been able to give him was enough.
His death notice included the mention that in 1880, he had married Alice in Wonderland. I like to think he would have been pleased at that, but the truth is he was the only one to whom this didn’t matter at all.
And now, for the first time in her life, Alice was truly alone. Wonderland was well and gone; I was left with a large house and larger bills—endless bills; I could not see an end to them, although I could see, alarmingly close, an end to my income. Taxes, death duties, the frightful expense of coal—at night I lay in bed, unable to sleep, doing sums in my head, never coming up with a comforting answer.
I was also left with a very impractical son who did not appear to share my concerns. Even when Caryl did come home, I cannot say I was overjoyed to see him, nor he me; we were both uneasy sitting next to each other at the long, empty dinner table. I couldn’t pretend to approve of his wastrel lifestyle—how many times did I tell him his brothers surely would have managed to do something more with their lives, had they been allowed? Yet for some reason this only spurred him to greater heights of frivolity, such as the time he stormed out, drove recklessly back toward London, and got a flat on the road; instead of simply changing the tire, he paid a farmer to tow him to Epsom, where he traded in the old car for a new—more expensive—one, and continued on.
Our arguments grew more heated with every visit, and I’m quite sure it was a topic of discussion among the servants. Knowing this made me even more angry; how dare they whisper about me! It was bad enough that I had to hide my jewelry these days instead of wearing it, for there was no trusting them. If it hadn’t been so difficult to find replacements, I would have sacked the whole lot.
Yet dining with Caryl, however uncomfortably, was better than sitting there alone as I did every other night, dressed in a faded evening dress (without my jewels, which made me feel rather naked), staring at the paintings—Papa’s old oils of the English countryside, quite dirty now, for I could not afford to have them cleaned—on the wall.
“It is very kind of you to allow me to remain here,” I told Caryl during one such occasion, after we had exhausted polite conversation before the soup course was done. “I realize that you’re the rightful heir to Cuffnells.”
“No, Mamma, this is your home. I’m not sure I’d want the place, anyway.” He looked about the great empty room, and for the first time I saw it through his eyes—the wallpaper was out of date, the chandelier messily wired for electricity, the ceiling plaster cracked. “Have you ever thought of taking in boarders, or renting the place out? It would pay for repairs and perhaps even give us more income. It’s so frightfully expensive in London, you know.”
“Boarders?” I stared at my son, who was carelessly sipping his soup. Strangers living here, where I raised my family? How could he suggest such a thing? “No, I shan’t be taking in boarders,” I said coldly, and pressed down upon the buzzer, summoning Mary Ann. “This soup is lukewarm; do take it away, and tell Cook I’ll speak to her later.”
That evening, after Caryl had returned to London—he rarely stayed even one night these days, although he did manage to apologize to me before he left—I sat in the library going over accounts, too worried about the future to allow myself the luxury of remembering the past. Once I had thought I could escape sadness simply by moving on; I remembered how I could not wait to quit Oxford, after Leo left and Edith died.
Now, although the grief was greater, I did not want to escape it; I felt as if I was hanging on to Cuffnells by my very fingernails, and there was no one—least of all Caryl; renting to boarders, indeed!—to catch me if I fell. I wished I owned something of value, something I might be able to sell, in order to keep Rex’s and Alan’s memories alive, for it was only here, at Cuffnells, that I felt I could remember what they looked like. It was only here that I could still see them, and Regi, too—walking the grounds, now overgrown, that meant so much to them all; hearing the echoes of their laughter from the billiard room, how often they had wagered against one another even though they knew I did not approve!
I simply could not bear to lose them all over again.
I rose, massaged my stiff fingers, and roamed the room, searching the shelves for valuable first editions, even though I knew there were none; I looked anyway, hoping that perhaps Regi might have bought something that I hadn’t known about. Then I smiled, fondly; Regi had never bought a book in his life.
Finally I found myself at the window, gazing out; it was dark, and I could see nothing but my own reflection, my hair—thoroughly gray now, but still with the same fringe; my serious, watchful eyes, that decided chin, now rather crinkled with age—and I thought, “Through the looking glass, indeed.” For there really was no logic to my life; I had traveled and searched and questioned and loved and tried, so very hard, yet still I ended up in this place with no answers, no solutions. There was no Wonderland; there had never been a Wonderland. There was only me, looking at myself in a mottled glass, unable to recognize the child I had been, the woman I had become, alone now with nothing to my name but a crumbling old house—
Then I looked down, at the glass-encased bookshelf. Pulling up a stool—for I could no longer sink to my knees without risking never getting up again—I opened the door. Staring at all the volumes of books, some in strange languages, but all with my name very prominently featured, I realized that I did possess something of value, after all. If only I had the courage to confront it.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was there, all the valuable first editions, even the handwritten original, all along. Family heirlooms, I had thought them. But now I had no family—except for where I could remember them, here at Cuffnells.
All these years, I had been afraid to read the book; afraid to see myself within the pages. But what had I known of fear, then? I had lost my sons to war, my husband to grief, and now I was about to lose my home. This was fear; this horrid, sinking feeling of not knowing where the ground was, or if my feet would ever reach it again. Of not knowing how I would hold on to the memories of those I loved, even if that love had come too late. But having found it, I could not bear to relinquish it.
Now, at this moment, I could open the pages of this book and read them, and imagine my son upon my lap once more, for it was here, in this room, where it had once been possible. Realizing that, I was no longer afraid of what I might find within the yellowed pages; I was only afraid that I had waited too long.
Taking a deep breath, I pulled out the book that Rex had asked me to read to him. I opened the cover, turned to the front page. “Down the Rabbit Hole … Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank.…” My voice quiet but steady, this time I continued reading aloud, even though I knew there was no one to hear. Still, I couldn’t shake the notion that perhaps Rex might be listening, after all.
When I got to the part where the White Rabbit was looking at his pocket watch—just like Papa used to; I had quite forgotten!—I began to chuckle, softly at first. As I read on, however, my laughter grew until one of the Mary Anns popped her head in the door, and I waved her away, still reading out loud, not caring what she told the others, only wanting to continue, as I was eager to see what happened next.
For finally, after all the years, the twisted paths that had brought me back, again and again, to a dark and dangerous place of memory, I could see Alice as others must have, and as I first experienced it that long-ago afternoon in a rowboat with my sisters: as a lovely, charming story about a very unflappable little girl caught in a maze of nonsensical, talkative creatures but not in any hurry to escape them.
I was not that little girl; I knew that now. Even when I begged Mr. Dodgson to write it down so that I could remain a child forever, he understood that was not going to happen. Already, he was missing me. It was obvious in the melancholy at the end of the story, when Alice’s sister thinks of her all grown-up, forgetting her dream.
Had he known that he would be the reason why I had to grow up so soon? I think that even I suspected that he would be the catalyst. Even so, the end of my childhood came about not because of what Mr. Dodgson had written; it was our private story, the one with an ending still unknown, that had done that. Not the story he had given to the world.
And now I would do the same. I would give it back, for I need not fear it any longer. And it would save me. He would save me. Mr. Dodgson, who disliked little boys; who had never been able to reconcile himself to the fact that I was grown up and married, a mother, had given me the means to save my sons’ home and preserve their childhood.
All it would cost was the last tangible evidence of my own.