He wasn’t. The Viscount stormed into the hall bellowing, “What’s all this then?” He was a large man, in all senses of the word, with a full head of graying hair curling around his burgundy necktie. He looked both immaculate and furious, stalking up to me and declaring rudely, “Who, may I ask, are you? And what do you want with my son?”
“I’m Mrs. Margaret Tilling,” I said in the best voice I could muster, praying that something clever would come out of my mouth. “I was a nurse at Dover, and I had a message from a friend of your son’s.” I paused, while he looked at me expecting more. “He never made it.”
“If it was that swine Berkeley, he’s better off dead.” He snarled at Carrington, who looked through him with practiced calm. “Poisoning my son with these notions—”
“He is dead.” I heard my own voice pipe up strong and audible through the vast hall. “He died that night at Dover, from a wound fighting off the Nazis at Dunkirk. He was a brave soldier, and deserves to be remembered as such.”
“He deserves to be remembered as nothing but a degenerate. He should have been hanged.”
“And yet it was all right that he gave his life—his life!—for this country? Why can’t you take off your blinkered glasses and see what is in front of your eyes? The man was nothing but a boy, trying to fight, trying to stay alive, helping you and your country survive for another day.”
Carrington’s look of complete alarm brought me back to earth with a bump. I was never going to convince this tyrant of anything. I just needed to get out and stop making it worse for Carrington. We all knew that as soon as the door was closed behind me, that poor young man would be chastised and denigrated until his life was hardly worth living either.
“I think you should leave now,” the Viscount said dismissively. “I don’t know who you are, but I heartily suggest that you learn some manners, my good woman.”
I took a brief look at Carrington—pensive, measured, silent—and then strode for the door.
The butler was now holding it open for me, and I sailed straight out and walked down the majestic stone staircase to the driveway, exemplary lawns metered out on either side, beyond which the wild, rolling hills and forests were packed with their own teeming hierarchies, playing out their own chains of command.
As I marched down the drive with a swing in my stride, I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have.
I took the bus back to Chilbury, uneasy about the way that I had left things with the Viscount. The malevolence and pride of these people is ruthless, clinging to their advantage in the face of our total annihilation. Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.
A sense of responsibility—or was it guilt?—hung over me, that I was in some way at fault because of cowering to all these pompous men all these years, when I should have had the bravery to reclaim my own mind. That if we women had done this years ago, before the last war, before this one, we’d be in a very different world.
And what about Carrington? That poor, devastated young man! Meeting him, and Berkeley even just briefly, makes me wonder why everyone makes such a fuss about homosexuality. Surely it’s not so terribly wrong? And isn’t love between two people better than hatred, in this world of violence and mourning? There seemed to me a fragile kindness in their love that survived through this poisonous war. Even though one of them hadn’t.
By the time I reached Chilbury, just as the sun was stretching long shadows over the shop and the square, I was feeling quite fraught. I decided to visit the church to see if that would settle me. I end up in the church more and more these days, waiting for the silence to seep inside. As I slipped through the overgrown graveyard, the mellow evening air rich with wild lavender and hawthorn, I found myself pausing by the ornate old grave of a young hero, a weathered statue of a sleeping lion resting over the top, its fat paws coveting the valuable body laid inside.
But valuable to whom? Two hundred years later, who is there left to remember this man, so carefully laid to rest, once so loved and real? Now all that would be left is a pile of dust, laid roughly in the shape of a human being, the frailness of our form putrid beside the enduring carved rock lion above it.
I found tears coming fast. This war is too much for me. I’m not the kind of woman to be battling it out with a viscount. I’m not built to deal with my son at war, maybe suffering just like Berkeley, his fragile body left to decay like all human flesh. The war will be the end of me.
I crumpled onto the grassy ground beside the grave, my face in my hands, wishing I could crawl away from all of this, pull the clock back to before the war started and sleep for a thousand years.