An Ice-Cream War

1: 6 June 1914, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

“What do you think would happen,” Colonel Theodore Roosevelt asked his son Kermit, “if I shot an elephant in the balls?”

“Father,” Kermit said, keeping a straight face, “I think it would hurt a great deal.”

The colonel roared with laughter.

Temple Smith smiled at this exchange as he supervised the unloading of the horses and equipment. The colonel and his son were sitting on the bench above the cowcatcher at the very front of the train. Temple couldn’t see them, yet he heard their conversation as clearly as if they were standing alongside. It must be, he reflected, some trick of the atmosphere, the stillness and dryness of the air.

The train had stopped in the middle of an enormous African plain. A tall sky, a few dawdling clouds. High blond grass, badged with occasional thorn trees and outcrops of rock, stretched away to a horizon of purple-blue hills. Mr Loring, the naturalist, thought he had seen a male oryx of a species which the hunting party had not yet bagged, and so a halt had been ordered.

Temple told the Somali grooms to lead out four Arab ponies and saddle them up. The Roosevelts, Mr Tarlton, the white hunter, and Mr Loring, the naturalist, would ride out in search of the oryx. The side of the long horse-box was lowered to the ground and the first of the small ponies was led down. It paced delicately about, as if testing the earth, and flicked its head and ears in irritation at the corona of buzzing flies that constantly attended it.

Temple took off his thick solar helmet and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. The heat was slamming down on the exposed train and not the slightest breeze stirred the tremendous grass prairie.

He heard, again with astonishing clarity, Colonel Roosevelt grunting as he eased himself down from the cowcatcher and stretched and stumped on the railway sleepers. He seemed to see him in his mind’s eye, almost as in a vision. The plump and rumpled figure wore a baggy army shirt, ill-fitting khaki jodhpurs buttoned tightly from knee to ankle and sagging around his bottom, and heavy boots. He saw the avuncular bespectacled face with its drooping walrus moustaches squint into the baleful sun. The colonel windmilled his arms and cracked his knuckles. “Good day for hunting,” he said, and paced stiffly up the track a few yards.

But then Temple’s view changed — miraculously — to Kermit. He saw Kermit’s small handsome features set in a thin smile. Saw him reach for his double-barrelled Rigby shotgun. Heard the oiled mechanical click as the twin hammers were cocked. Saw the barrels slowly raise to point at the colonel’s broad back.

“No!” Temple said to himself in horror, dropping the pony’s reins he was holding. He spun round and looked up the train towards the locomotive. Sure enough, the colonel stood some fifteen yards up the track, his back to the engine, staring out at the landscape. But Temple could not see Kermit. Astonished at this clairvoyant vision, he sensed that in some way it had been granted to him precisely so he could prevent the assassination of this esteemed military hero and ex-president of the United States of America.

“No!” Temple shouted again, drawing startled looks from Mr Loring and the black handlers. “No, Mr Roosevelt sir, for God’s sake don’t do it!”

He began to run towards the head of the train, his feet slipping on the earth and stones of the embankment. Again, in a flash of prescient vision he saw Kermit’s aim settle between his father’s shoulder blades. Saw the knuckle of Kermit’s forefinger whiten as the first slack was taken up on the trigger.

“No!” Temple screamed. “Stop! He’s your father for Christ’s sake!”

Boom! went the twin barrels. The colonel’s shirt erupted in a splash of blood and tattered khaki as the two-foot spread of cartridge pellets pitched him onto his face.

♦

Temple flicked up the mosquito net and sat on the edge of the bed. He stood up and stretched. He was naked. He rubbed his shoulders and chest, slapped his buttocks and touched his cock.

Temple was a small stocky man in his early forties, about five foot six with a barrel chest and thick muscular legs. His once compact frame was still just visible even under the amount of excess fat it was nowadays obliged to carry. He had a sizeable belly and there were two diagonal folds of flesh on his back, running from the nape of his neck to his kidneys. His chest and broad shoulders were covered in thick greying springy hair. His jaw line had long ago disappeared into one of his chins. His pepper and salt hair was cut short and parted in the middle and he had a dark bushy, drooping moustache that grew well over his top lip. This moustache was such a prominent feature that it was often the only personal detail that could be recalled of him. His nose was small, almost snub, and his eyes were pale and innocuous.

He walked over to the window and opened the shutters an inch or two. From his room on the top floor of the Kaiserhof Hotel he had a good view of Dar-es-Salaam’s capacious natural harbour. There, anchored a quarter of a mile offshore, lay the cruiser Königsberg. Her 4.1-inch guns sounded the last of her salute. The quayside was crowded with spectators and bunting was strung from every available telegraph pole, window-ledge and balcony. With a clash of cymbals the band of the Schütztruppe, the colony’s army, started up ‘Deutschland über alles’ and the guard of honour was inspected by its commander, Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.

Temple turned away smiling, thinking about his dream. He hadn’t dreamt about Roosevelt for years. He yawned. He supposed he should be grateful to the old swine, really. After all, without Roosevelt he would never have come to Africa. In 1909, as the manager of a small iron foundry in Sturgis, New Jersey, Temple had reached a stage in his life where the only prospects were increasing boredom and frustration. Then he had seen the Smithsonian Institute’s advertisement for a manager to run and organize a hunting and specimen collecting trip in Africa. He had applied, got the job and had embarked with the Roosevelts and their tons of luggage two months later. It hadn’t lasted long. The Roosevelts shot anything that moved. Worried about the large numbers of winged and wounded animals they left in their wake, Temple had voiced a mild protest. At which Kermit had promptly ‘sacked’ him, as the English said.

Temple screwed up his face. The old man was all right. It was Kermit whom he’d never gotten on with. Yet when the colonel’s book—African Game Trail— had appeared in 1913 there hadn’t been a single reference to Temple. Punishment, he assumed. He asked himself if any reader had wondered how the hunting party, with its immense paraphernalia, had moved from A to B; how trains had been loaded and unloaded? He told himself not to fret: in the long run the Roosevelts had done him a favour, and it was the long run that was important as far as he was concerned.

Temple allowed himself the luxury of a bath and then dressed in his freshly laundered clothes. The Kaiserhof was the best hotel in East Africa, in his opinion. Better than the Norfolk in Nairobi and the Grand in Mombasa. Hot and cold running water, servants drilled with Teutonic thoroughness and within five minutes’ rickshaw ride of an excellent brewery.

After breakfast, Temple stepped out of the hotel onto Arabstrasse. The Kaiserhof was in reality the railway hotel, built some six years before at the commencement of the Dar-Lake Tanganyika central railway project. It was a stone building of some size topped with fake crenellation and it stood at the corner of Arabstrasse and Bahnhofstrasse. Behind Temple lay the harbour lagoon with its newly erected pier, Port Offices and customs sheds. Before him was the festering Indian town, made up of crumbling mud houses packed together in a maze of narrow fetid lanes. If he had walked to the east, continuing up Arabstrasse, he would have come to Unter den Akazien, the main commercial thoroughfare, where evidence of German neatness and efficiency was more apparent. Unter den Akazien’s narrow, flamboyant-lined avenue led to the residential areas of Dar. Wooded, spacious roads, solid two-and three-storey stone colonial houses with red tiled roofs, and a large and beautifully laid out botanical garden.

It was this last feature of the town that had brought Temple to Dar, to buy coffee seedlings. His dealings with the colony’s director of agriculture, or the Chef der Abteilung für Landeskultur und Landesvermessung to give his official title, had been brisk and satisfactory. For a reasonable price, crates of coffee seedlings were being prepared and would be ready for him to transport back to his own farm the next day.

It was a long journey back to Temple’s farm, which lay near the foot of Kilimanjaro in British East Africa. First there was the coastal steamer from Dar to Tanga, and then a day’s journey from Tanga to Moshi on the Northern Railway, followed by a further day’s waggon ride across the border to BEA and his own farm near the small town and former mission station of Taveta.

His business had been successfully completed the day before, he had some money left, so he decided to savour the carnival atmosphere that currently pervaded the town. The German colony was flourishing, the Central Railway had just been completed. It was to be officially opened in August and a huge Dar-es-Salaam Exhibition had been planned to coincide with it. Hence, Temple assumed, the arrival of the German flotilla — the Königsberg and several destroyers, survey ships and a fleet tender.

Temple turned and walked down Bahnhofstrasse, past the splendid new station and onto the dockside. A large crowd of several hundred people had turned out to welcome and admire the Königsberg. In the morning sun its slim lines and three tall funnels stood out with emphatic sharpness. Strings of flags had been run up its masts and its crew lined the decks at attention.

The crowd was carefully segregated. On either side of the Port Offices were the Indians, Arabs and natives. In front of the offices, beneath the brightly striped awnings, the German colonials gathered. A sizeable guard of immaculate askaris was lined up on the quayside. A young European officer put them through some elementary drill routines. They seemed as capable and organized as any European troops Temple had seen. On a temporary dais the Schütztruppe brass band blared forth martial music.

Temple looked about him. Everyone was got up in their finery. The women all wore white dresses with lacy trims and carried parasols. The men wore formal suits with hats, collars and ties. Temple joined the crowd and watched the captain of the Königsberg arriving ashore. He was greeted by Von Lettow-Vorbeck, a dapper small man with a completely shaven head, and the governor of German East Africa, Herr Schnee. They then proceeded to a bedecked and sheltered row of armchairs and there followed a succession of speeches. Temple’s German was rudimentary and he understood virtually nothing of what was said. He wandered away.

Moored some distance from the Königsberg was the Deutsche-Ost-Afrika liner, the Tabora, which the cruiser had escorted for the last half of its journey from Bremerhaven. Passengers from the Tabora were disembarking at a jetty.

Nearby, gangs of natives unloaded supplies and large numbers of cabin trunks and suitcases from a lighter.

“Hello Smith,” came a voice — strangely high-pitched — in English.

Temple turned, he was surprised to hear impeccable English accents among so much German. He was even more surprised to see that it came from an officer in the Schütztruppe.

“Good God,” Temple said, his American accent contrasting strongly with his interlocutor’s. “Erich von Bishop. What are you doing in that outfit? I thought you’d left the army.”

Von Bishop was Temple’s neighbour. Their farms both lay in the Kilimanjaro region, separated by a few miles and the border between German and British East Africa. Von Bishop was a tall, lean man with a melancholy, clean-shaven face. He had a large sharp nose and an unusually long upper lip which, Temple supposed, was responsible for him looking literally so down in the mouth. He was one of those men who narrowly miss being freakishly ugly: the odd features were just under control. The most surprising thing about him was his voice. It was boyishly high and reedy, full of air and sounding as if it would give out any second. Like von Lettow-Vorbeck, his commander, his head was shaven to a prickly grey stubble. He wore the brilliant starched white uniform of a Schütztruppe captain and carried a sabre by his side.

“I’m in the reserve,” he reminded Temple. “Everyone’s been summoned for the celebration, there’s a big parade later today. And besides, I’m meeting my wife. She’s arriving from Germany,” he gestured at the harbour. “On the Tabora.”

“Well, I won’t detain you any further,” Temple said. He had never met von Bishop’s wife, but knew she had been away for over a year.

“No, please,” von Bishop said. “I insist on you meeting her. After all, we are neighbours of a sort.”

“Delighted,” Temple said. He was, he had to admit, curious. He didn’t know von Bishop well. They had met perhaps four times in the three years since Temple had settled at his farm, but he had formed sufficient opinions about the man — he thought he was extremely odd — to wonder what his wife looked like.

Von Bishop was in his early fifties and, as Temple knew, half-German and half-English. For some reason, in his youth he had gone to the German military academy at Kassel and had come out to East Africa in the nineties. He had distinguished himself in the putting down of the brutal Maji-Maji rebellion in 1907 and had been awarded the honorary title of ‘von’ in recognition of his services. He had a large and thriving farm growing maize and bananas.

The two men moved towards the crowd that was greeting the arriving passengers. Temple saw von Bishop stiffen with recognition as a woman walked up the steps from the lighter to the jetty. She was wearing a simple air-blue ankle-length dress with small ruffs at the end of the long sleeves. Her face was shadowed by a wide straw hat. Temple waited for von Bishop to go forward to greet her but he didn’t move.

“Ah-ha,” he said cautiously. “There she is.”

“Who?” Temple asked. “Is that your wife?”

“My dear wife,” he said feelingly. He clasped his hands in front of him and stood his ground. Temple wondered why he didn’t step forward and welcome her.

“Oh dear,” von Bishop said, making his face sadder.

“What’s wrong?”

“She looks…she looks different. What shall I say? Very healthy. Yes, healthy.”

The woman seemed in no particular hurry either. She stepped off the jetty and looked idly around. Every now and then she reached into her bag and put something into her mouth.

“Erich!” she had seen him and came over. Only then did von Bishop go to meet her. He politely kissed her on the cheek and spoke some words in German. He offered his wife his arm and led her over to Temple.

“This is Mr Smith, our neighbour in British East Africa. Mr Smith, my wife Liesl.”

“How do you do,” Temple said. “I hope your trip was enjoyable.”

“Yes,” she said slowly in English, with a strong German accent. “It was quite tolerable, thank you. I’m happy to meet you.” They shook hands. A strong gust of peppermint came from her mouth when she spoke.

She was a well-built woman, Temple noticed, who looked to be considerably younger than von Bishop, perhaps in her mid-thirties. She was tall, like her husband, and had broad shoulders and a heavy bosom and hips. Her skin was very pale and creamy and her face was covered in large freckles. Her nose was slightly hooked and her eyes were green. Her mouth was wide and her upper lip was the same size as her lower — if not slightly larger — which gave her a look of constantly biting back her words. From beneath her hat some strands of crinkled bright ginger hair had escaped.

Von Bishop left to supervise the loading of her luggage into a rickshaw.

“And what are you doing in Dar?” Frau von Bishop asked abruptly.

“I’ve come down to buy coffee seedlings,” Temple explained. “We have nothing like your botanical garden in British East. But, I must confess I wanted to see Dar and, um, your splendid new railway.” He wondered why he was talking in this ridiculous manner. It was something to do with the almost permanent mood of censure that seemed to emanate from the woman.

“You are not English, I think?” she said, cocking her head to one side, as if she had caught him out in some way.

“No,” Temple confessed. “I’m American. From the United States of America. I came over in ‘09 with President Roosevelt on his hunting trip. And I, ah, decided to stay on.”

“I see,” she said. There was an awkward pause. “What is Erich doing? Would you like a peppermint?” She offered Temple a paper bag.

“Why, thank you.” He put the sweet in his mouth. He didn’t like peppermint that much.

“For…mal de mer. How do you say it?”

“I’m sorry? What’s maldermare?” To Temple’s surprise Frau von Bishop energetically mimed a vomiting motion, complete with noises.

“Sick,” she said. “At sea.”

“Oh. Sea-sick. Yes, mmm.”

“Sea-sick?” She seemed irritated at the simple logic of the word. “It’s for sea-sick. Peppermint.”

Temple nodded his comprehension vigorously. There was another pause. “Well,” Temple began uneasily, “it must be nice to be back.”

She seemed about to make an answer but was interrupted by the return of her husband.

“They have it all,” von Bishop announced cheerily, referring to the luggage. “Shall we go?”

He and his wife climbed into a rickshaw.

“We are guests of the Governor,” von Bishop said. “Can we take you anywhere?”

“No thank you,” Temple said thankfully. “I think I’ll observe the pomp and circumstance a little longer. Then I intend to sample some of your German beer.”

“Of course, good-bye then.”

“Good-bye, Mr Smith,” Frau von Bishop said with impressive finality. “A pleasure to meet you.”

“Good-bye,” said Temple, raising his hat.

“Wait!” squeaked von Bishop. “When are you going back to Taveta?”

“Well…tomorrow.”

“Excellent, excellent. We can travel together. ‘Till tomorrow, Smith.”

As they drove off Temple saw Frau von Bishop snapping harshly at her husband. What strange people, Temple thought. He watched the small caravan of rickshaws — the von Bishops leading three others carrying luggage — move along the gentle are of the harbour front, past the Catholic church, the post office and the European club towards the Governor’s palace nestling in its grove of palm and mango trees at the mouth of the lagoon. He let his gaze swing round to the crowded flotilla on the sparkling water, then he turned away. He moved through the crowd and walked to the back of the Port Offices. He called a rickshaw over and climbed in. The half-naked African pulling it looked round for instructions.

“Die Brauerei,” Temple said. If he was going to be travelling back with the von Bishops he’d better make the most of his last day.

♦

Later that same evening Temple slipped out of the Kaiserhof. It was half past ten and the moonless sky was filled with stars. Unthinkingly his eye picked out the constellations and stars as it always did: Orion’s Belt, the rest of Orion scattered vaguely about, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Venus. The streets around him were empty and dark. Electric light shone from the windows of the Kaiserhof and from the lounge came the tinkling of a pianola. The night was very warm. From the warren of the Indian town sweet smells wafted and there were shouts and drum beats, as if someone were having a party. Temple walked a few yards up Unter den Akazien. He didn’t want to go into the Indian town on foot on his own. He saw a rickshaw and called it over. He gave the name of a hotel on Marktstrasse. The rickshaw boy pulled him swiftly through the dark lanes. Temple sat back on the hard wooden seat and enjoyed the slight breeze.

“Here, bwana,” said the rickshaw boy. Temple got down and paid him. ‘Kitumoinee Hotel’ it said, in faded painted letters above the door. Temple walked in. Oil lamps set up a soft inviting glow. There was a babble of muted conversation.

About a dozen sailors from the Königsberg sat around tables in the large ground floor room. Some civilian engineers from the railway played cards. In one corner was a small wooden bar in front of some shelves with bottles of alcohol on them. Behind the bar stood a swarthy Goanese.

“Bitte, mein Herr?” he said as Temple approached. Temple walked over and placed his hands carefully on the bar surface. He swallowed.

“Guten Abend,” he said. “Do you speak English?” Some of the sailors looked round at the unfamiliar accent. Temple felt the close heat in the room cause his clothes to stick to his body. He wondered why he was bothering to go to all this trouble.

“Englisch?” said the Goanese. “Nein.”

Shit, Temple swore to himself. “Upstairs?” he said, pointing at the ceiling.

The Goanese smiled his comprehension. “Oh ja,” he said. Then indicated the sailors. “Ein Moment, ja?”

Temple sat down and drank two glasses of beer. Three sailors clattered down the wooden stairs from the first floor, smiling and grinning and immediately went into a huddle with their friends.

Temple smoked a cigarette. He tried to keep his mind empty of thoughts. He concentrated on the taste of the beer. It was good beer, he said to himself, brewed right here in the city, as good beer as he’d tasted in Africa…He looked round the bar. For a bar it was decidedly quiet, he observed. A muttering of conversation from the sailors, a flip of cards from the engineers, the occasional scrape of a chair on the paved floor. It was as if everyone were afraid of drawing attention to himself, wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Two more sailors descended the stairs. The Goanese proprietor came over and took away his beer glass. He smiled and nodded at Temple, shooting his eyes in the direction of the floor above. Temple stood up. He was about to walk over to the stairs when the proprietor touched his elbow.

“Vier Rupee, bitte,” he said. Temple paid him the money.

He climbed the stairs, acutely aware of the clump of his boots on the wood. On the first floor landing were three doors. Gently he tested the first, but it seemed locked. He was about to open the second when a German sailor came out. Temple stood to one side and the sailor moved past. He said something to Temple in German but Temple didn’t understand, but he smiled wryly, shrugged his shoulders and gave a chuckle. He sensed it had been that sort of remark. Temple moved to the third door, pushed it open and went inside. The room was small and bare except for an iron bed. In one wall was a small window which overlooked Marktstrasse. The shutters of this window were open a few inches and a native woman stood in front of them looking down on the street. On a ledge above the bed was a crude lamp, a burning wick in a bowl of oil.

The woman by the window was chewing something vigorously. She was wearing a rough cotton shift and had a bright fringed shawl loosely about her shoulders. With the toes of her right foot she scratched the back of her left calf.

Temple cleared his throat and shut the door behind him. The woman looked round.

“Abend,” she said dully and went over to the bed. She looked a strange mixture of Arab, Indian and Negro, Temple thought. Her hair was long and wiry and tied up in a complicated knot. Around her neck she had ropes of beads and metallic neck-laces. On her thin arms she had a large collection of bracelets. The bed was covered in a grey blanket. Temple moved closer. He saw that her hair was thickly oiled, and indeed that her entire body was covered in a thin layer of shiny grease. Dark blue tattoo marks stood out against the dark brown skin of her forearms. Set in her nose was a brass stud of a simple flower shape. Her middle parting had been smeared with a rusty, ochrous unguent. A cloying, oddly farinaceous smell came from her body. Temple wondered how many races, cults, theologies and customs were meeting in this small room tonight, and what little portion he would add to the mix.

He looked around him and became suddenly aware of the accumulated filth of the place. He saw the rickety bedstead strengthened with wire, saw the flies and insects buzzing and crawling round the flame of the lamp. He could sense the blanket alive and twitching with bed bugs.

He scratched his head. He’d been in some fairly primitive whore-houses in his time, but this won first prize. Still, he thought, he’d come all this way: it seemed pointless not to see the thing through.

The woman folded her shawl carefully over the end of the bed. With a single movement and a clank of bangles she removed her shirt. She was now wearing only her jewellery collection. More strings of beads were wrapped round her waist, Temple noticed. It would be like going to bed with the bric-a-brac counter at a dime store. He wondered vaguely if the beads were talismen of some kind.

The woman sat down and with an innocently lewd gesture parted her legs in order to examine more closely the irritation on the back of her left calf. To his annoyance, Temple realized he was smoothing down his hair. The woman’s breasts were low slung and oddly pointed. The tattoos he’d seen on her forearm were extended over portions of her torso.

Unhappily he unbuckled his belt and undid the buttons on his trousers. He was wearing no drawers but the woman didn’t spare him a glance. She only looked up when he stumbled as he tried to step out of his trousers. He’d forgotten, in his absorption with the exotic, to remove his boots.

“Moment,” the woman said, and strolled languidly to the window, her low breasts swaying and juddering. She chewed fiercely for a second or two then spat something out into the night. There was a dull clang as whatever it was hit a tin roof below.

That does it, Temple thought. My God, this is depressing.

Tonight was his last night: he was meant to be having fun. He pulled up his trousers.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Nothing personal, lady. But goodnight.” As he left he heard her bangles rattle — it sounded like a kind of laughter, he thought — as she pulled her shirt back on.

2: 8 June 1914, The Northern Railway, German East Africa

Liesl von Bishop stared out at the towering green humps of the Usambara hills as the train slowly chugged alongside them on its way north to the terminus at Moshi. Her eyes barely registered the movement of game, deer and antelopes, bounding away from the track. She felt an intense boredom settle on her. The air in the compartment was hot and muggy despite every available window being opened wide. She pressed her forehead against the warm glass and shifted her position on the shiny leather seat. She felt her buttocks begin to itch. A fly buzzed somewhere above her head. She rubbed her stinging eyes. Erich and the fat American had smoked continuously, it seemed, ever since they had left Tanga. Why, oh why had she come back to Africa? She wondered for the hundredth time since her arrival three days ago. A night in Dar, suffering the condescension of Governor Schnee and his opinionated milkmaid of a New Zealander wife. Then a heaving, wallowing sea journey in a filthy tramp steamer from Dar to Tanga, the luggage reloaded and unloaded yet again. A troubled stay at the Deutsche Kaiser Hotel in Tanga; Erich and the fat American up all night joking and drinking with red-faced farmers and Schütztruppe officers. Erich drunkenly whispering to her as he climbed unsteadily into the creaking bed, then falling into a crapulous sleep almost immediately.

It started again in the morning: three hours in the dust and stink of Tanga station, hot, thirsty, surrounded by piles of luggage. The fat American running about worriedly, looking for water to moisten his wretched coffee seedlings. Erich was sullen and sore-headed. She walked about Tanga’s station buildings searching for cool shade, fanning herself with a silk fan her mother had given her as a leaving present. She noticed that all three clocks on Tanga station told a different time.

Finally the ancient train backed arthritically into the station. The luggage and crates were loaded on board and they secured their seats in a first class compartment. There was another unaccountable wait of forty minutes before the train pulled out of Tanga on its daily run to Bangui, midway between Tanga and Moshi. At Bangui they would have to spend another night as trains between Bangui and Moshi only travelled twice a week. Liesl sighed, thinking of the speed and efficiency of travelling in Germany. From her family home in Koblenz to her sister in München in under one day!

She turned her head and flipped open her fan. For some reason the American was standing up, swaying dangerously to the motion of the train. A small black buckled cheroot poked from between the bristles of his moustache and he was rubbing his buttocks vigorously, pummelling them with his fists as if he were plumping cushions.

He smiled, but his moustache still obscured his mouth, only the changing contours of his cheeks and the disappearance of his eyes in deltas of wrinkles indicated this new facial expression.

He spoke, without removing his foul-smelling cigar from his mouth — a very common man, she thought, having noticed earlier his appalling table manners at the hotel: a common man indeed.

“All this sitting down,” he said. “Kinda makes a man stiffen up.”

What was he talking about? Liesl asked herself. She could hardly understand a word he said — his whining, droning accent — and she prided herself on her English. She smiled tightly back and resumed her hill-watching out of the window.

“Tell me, Erich,” she heard the American say, softening the ch to a sh. “What’s all this talk about war between England and Germany?”

She closed her ears. War war war. She was tired of hearing men talk about war. They were like children. Her father, her brother-in-law, her nephews. War, politics, war, politics. She sighed again, quietly so Erich wouldn’t hear, and she thought about her sister’s home in München. Electric lights, water closets, beautiful furniture, the richness and variety of the food. She’d forgotten what it was like: all those years with Erich on the farm, she’d forgotten about the choice and the succulence. She’d eaten so much on this last trip home, as if she were storing it up, like some animal about to go into hibernation. She could feel her hips and belly bulging beneath her corset, loosened to the full extent of its ties. None of her African clothes fitted her any more. She could feel her blouse cutting into her armpits, sense its material stretched — tight as a goose-berry — across her broad shoulders.

Itches ran down the back of her thighs. The heat rash was starting, after only three days! She needed to bathe every day, and she hadn’t had a proper opportunity since she’d left the Tabora. She cursed her fair complexion, her soft moist skin, suddenly envying the American his freedom to stand up and scratch.

To take her mind off her discomfort she opened her travelling bag and took out the thin wooden box. Turkish Delight, bought in Port Said, her last box. She had bought five, meaning to hoard them, but she had eaten her way greedily through the lot on the voyage out as if it were the last time she’d ever taste it.

She took off the lid. There were three pieces left, like large chunks of uncut precious stone, pale pink, seeming to glow beneath their dusting of powdered sugar. She picked up the little wooden prongs and stabbed them into the largest piece and popped it into her mouth. Saliva flowed. She chewed slowly and carelessly, allowing bits of the sweet to become lodged in her teeth. Two pieces left. She shut her eyes, relishing the pleasure, forgetting her itches for a moment.

“Must be good stuff,” she heard the American say. And then Erich’s false machine laugh.

“Ah, you see Liesl has developed a sweet tooth.”

She opened her eyes and saw them grinning at her like two idiots. She offered Erich the box. He waved it away, accompanying the gesture with a little snort of air through his nostrils. She held it out to the American. He peered in, almost timidly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever come across this before. What’s it called?”

“Turkish Delight,” she said flatly.

“Hey. All the way from Turkey.” Two blunt and calloused fingers plucked a piece out. Only one left.

“An exotic experience,” the American said. “Light shines through it too. That’s nice.”

She watched him as he bit the delicacy in half, raised his eyebrows in approval, then finished it off, licking his fingers. Icing sugar whitened the ends of his moustache.

“Now that’s what I call a sweet,” he said, relighting his cheroot. “Very nice indeed.”

♦

Liesl knew she had been sulking and in a bad mood all day, but she didn’t care. And once they arrived at Bangui there was little chance of an improvement. The guest house was small and dirty and kept by a taciturn railway engineer’s wife. Liesl slept fitfully for two hours in the afternoon saying she had a headache. As dusk gathered outside she got up, washed her face and went downstairs to the bar-cum-dining room that occupied most of the ground floor. She strolled outside to the verandah. Erich and the American sat on cane chairs looking out over the dusty main street. She joined them, assuring her husband she was feeling much better. She asked a native servant to bring her a cup of coffee.

“Here they come again,” Temple Smith said, looking up the street.

A squad of about sixty askaris was being drilled by a German NCO. They marched briskly down the street, halted, ordered arms and stood at ease. Then they shouldered arms and marched off followed by a crowd of small boys.

“Now why,” Temple said, wagging a forefinger at von Bishop, “why are your askaris being drilled like this? It looks like you’re expecting trouble.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” von Bishop said. “I don’t know what’s going on. They say it’s for the exhibition in August, but since von Lettow came, everything has changed. They even called me up.” He spread his arms and shrugged his shoulders.

Temple turned politely to Liesl. “Do you think there will be war in Europe, Mrs von Bishop? Was this the talk when you were there?”

Liesl wrenched her attention away from a lizard which was stalking an ant.

“There was some talk. But with Russia, I think. Not England. I don’t know.” She smiled apologetically. “I didn’t listen very hard. I’m not very interested.” Her English sounded thick and clumsy on her longue. She hadn’t had to speak it for so long. She resented having to speak it now, for this American’s sake.

Temple frowned and turned back to von Bishop. “I can’t see there being any fighting out here, can you?”

“I doubt it,” von Bishop said. “It seems most unlikely. Von Lettow is just a very cautious man.”

Liesl let them talk on. It was marginally cooler now the sun was setting, turning the Usambara hills behind them a golden bracken colour. Crickets began to cheep and chirrup and she smelt the odour of charcoal fires. The boy brought her coffee, and she sipped it slowly. An oil lamp was lit on the verandah and some moths immediately began to circle round it casting their flickering shadows over the few Europeans who sat on chatting. For the first time since setting foot on shore at Dar Liesl felt she was truly back in Africa, the memories of Europe which she had protectively gathered around her slipped away, or retired to a safer distance.

She looked at her husband. He caught her eye for a moment and then his glance jumped guiltily away. She wondered if he would try tonight. They hadn’t been together for over a year, the time she’d spent away. On the voyage back her mind had turned regularly to their reunion, and she had been vaguely surprised at the vigour of her desire. But that had been on the ship. Now she was quite indifferent.

She looked covertly at his thin bony body, his taut, lined face, his big nose, his soft, thick old-man’s ears. She wished he hadn’t shaved his head like a soldier. It accentuated the angularity of his jawbone, seemed to deepen the hollow of his temples, made his nose look longer…He was nervous tonight, she could see.

She sighed. She had been away once before to Europe on her own, in 1907 during the Maji-Maji rebellion. Since then it had been six years without a break. During that period the Northern Railway had been completed, Erich had resigned his commission and bought the farm on the northern slopes of the Pare hills facing Kilimanjaro. The farm prospered, the ground was rich and fertile. They built a large stone bungalow. They lived well, and money steadily accumulated in the bank as the crops were transported down the Northern Railway to the port at Tanga.

Oh, but the life! The beauty of their surroundings, the success of their enterprise couldn’t make up for the tedium of the diurnal round. Erich was away all day in the plantations, returning exhausted at night. She had many servants to do her work for her, but she was always uncomfortable in the heat, her fair skin wasn’t suited to the sun. Every biting insect saw her as a delectable target. She seemed to sweat unceasingly, her clothes rough and chafing against her moist skin. She got fevers regularly. Her neighbours were remote and uncongenial, there were few diversions in Moshi, and Erich was not a man for dances or social gatherings.

Then, last year, she spent an entire month locked in a severe fever, her body trembling with rigors, her teeth chattering for hours. She announced she was going home to convalesce as soon as she began to recover. Erich couldn’t refuse. They had a bank account full of money. She could return to her family with pride, armed with purchasing power. She smiled at her spend thriftiness. She’d spent everything she had, bought presents and luxuries, spoilt her little nephews and nieces. How they had loved Aunt Liesl from Africa! It had been a marvellous year.

She smiled again, perhaps that was why Erich was so nervous. When she left a year ago she had been thin and miserable, still wasted from the fever. Perhaps Erich didn’t recognize her now. She touched her neck reflectively, feeling its creamy softness. Maybe Erich thought he was seeing a ghost.

♦

The next morning Liesl, von Bishop and Temple Smith stood on Buiko station watching two companies of Schütztruppe askaris climb onto half a dozen flat cars attached to the rear of the Moshi train.

Liesl fanned her face with her straw hat. Again Erich had sat up drinking with the American. He had eased himself silently into bed, careful not to touch her, thinking she was asleep. Liesl felt irritation mount in her again. Flies buzzed furiously around her face, settling for split seconds on her eyelids and lips. Waking this morning she had counted two jigger fleas beneath the big toe nail on her left foot. Small red spots, slightly painful to the touch. How could she have jiggers already? Thank God she would be home soon. Her houseboy Mohammed was expert at removing the sac of maggoty eggs the fleas laid beneath the skin. He used a pin: like extracting a tiny winkle from its tight little shell. She never felt any pain when Mohammed did it.

Eventually they boarded the train and it pulled out of Buiko on the final leg to Moshi. The Usambara hills gave way to the gentler Pare range as they rattled steadily northwards through lush green parklands, the hills on their right, the Pangani river on their left.

“There is talk,” she heard her husband say, “of banning native shambas and villages from a five-mile-wide strip the entire length of the line. It’s such good farmland and so close to the railway.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” Temple observed, looking out of the window. “They do it in British East. I only wish my farm was as good as this.” He looked to his left at the line of trees that marked the Pangani.

“Ha!” he exclaimed, making Liesl jump. “There she is!”

The train was rounding a gentle curve to the right. They all crowded to the window. There, dominating the view ahead, was Kilimanjaro, bluey-purple in the distance, its snowy peaks unobscured by clouds.

“Magnificent,” Erich said. “Now I know I’m home.”

The sun flashed on the window of the compartment, blinding Liesl momentarily. She reached into her bag and rummaged around inside it for a pair of coloured spectacles. Kilimanjaro dimmed slightly, subdued by the thick dark green lenses, but lost none of its grim majesty. Contrary to the elation the others felt, Liesl’s heart felt weighted with the recognition. She had lived so long with the splendid mountain facing her house that she did not see it as a glorious monument, but rather as a hostile and permanent jailer, or some strict guardian.

She leant back in her seat, glad she had put her glasses on because she felt her eyes full of tears. How long would it be before she left again? she wondered despairingly.

“Liesl!” came a high pitched cry.

In considerable surprise and alarm she was jerked out of her morose reverie and saw her husband’s quivering forefinger pointing at her, his mouth hanging open in a crude imitation of disbelief.

“What on earth have you got on your face?” he cried. “Those…things!”

“What things,” she demanded furiously.

“Those glasses, spectacles.”

“They are coloured glasses,” she said speaking very slowly, trying to conceal her annoyance. “I bought them in Marseilles on the voyage out. To help my eyes against the sun.”

“But I don’t know if they’re…correct to be worn.” Erich rebuked her, giving her a shrill nervous laugh for the American’s benefit. “I mean, you look like you’re blind. Don’t you think so, Smith? Like a blind woman who should be selling matches.”

Liesl felt angry at this display of pettiness, especially when she heard a loud laugh from the American at Erich’s observation. She dropped into German.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Erich,” she said through gritted teeth. “Everyone wears them in Europe.”

Although Smith couldn’t have understood, it was clear he hadn’t mistaken her tone, as he spoke up in her defence.

“I do believe coloured glasses are almost dee-rigger these days,” he said. “I see many people in Nairobi wearing them. Why, the Uganda Railway has coloured glass in the windows of their passenger carriages.”.

“There you are, Erich,” she said, her eyes narrowed. “You have been on your farm too long.”

Von Bishop grunted sceptically. The atmosphere in the compartment was heavy with tension. The American was smiling broadly at them both, as if his smiles could magically disperse the mood.

He took out his fob watch and opened it. “Ah,” he said. “Well, only two more hours to go.”

♦

Liesl and von Bishop were met at Moshi station by two of their farm boys. Liesl’s luggage was loaded onto an American buggy drawn by two mules. The von Bishop farm was not more than an hour’s ride from Moshi, due south into the lush foothills of the Pare mountains.

Temple’s farm foreman, Saleh, was a Swahili from the coast, a small wizened alert man upon whom Temple relied more than he liked, but there was no sign of him, any farm boys, or the ox-cart with its team of six oxen that was intended to haul the crates of coffee seedlings the ten miles from Moshi to Taveta, the first settlement across the border in British East Africa.

Liesl watched Temple supervise the unloading of the crates onto the low platform. When their own luggage was secured on the buggy she called out to him.

“Mr Smith. We are ready to go.”

He came over and shook her hand.

“A real pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mrs von Bishop.” She found his accent easier to understand. “I must say,” he went on, “this, ah, agricultural endeavour of mine has been greatly, um…Your company has…and I only hope our conversation wasn’t too boring.”

Von Bishop joined them. “Well, Smith, we must be going. No sign of your boys?”

“No, damn them — excuse me, Mrs Bishop. I think I’ve hired the laziest bunch of niggers in British East Africa.”

“Niggers?”

“Natives, my dear,” von Bishop explained.

“Don’t let me keep you,” Temple said. “I know you must be keen to get home.” He shook von Bishop’s hand. “Good to see you again, Erich. Why don’t you ride over and visit my sisal factory one day.”

“I might just do that, Smith. I might just do that.”

They left Temple pacing up and down outside Moshi station. Von Bishop helped Liesl into the buggy and climbed up to join her. He shook the reins, the mules reluctantly started, and the buggy trundled off down the dusty street. Liesl looked back and saw Temple take off his terai hat and mop his brow with a handkerchief. He saw her turn and he waved his hat at her before his squat figure disappeared from view as they rounded a bend to pass beneath the huge embankments of the new fort the Schütztruppe had built at Moshi. Liesl looked up at the stone walls and crude square buildings of the boma and saw the black, white and red flag of the Imperial Army hanging limply against its flagpole.

“He’s a curious man, the American,” she remarked to her husband, to break through the silence that sat between them.

“And a foolish man as well,” von Bishop said with a laugh. “If he thinks he can grow coffee at Taveta he must have more money than sense.”

3: 10 June 1914, Taveta, British East Africa

“Bwana Smith is a great merchant,” Saleh extemporized, singing in Swahili and cracking his whip idly in time at the lead bull ox in the lumbering team. They had just crossed the Anglo-German boundary and were making their way along a rough track that wandered between the many small hillocks that were a feature of the landscape at this spot.

Temple saw Saleh glance back over his shoulder to make sure he was listening to the song.

“Bwana Smith has bought coffee of exquisite beauty,” he droned. “He will grow many coffee plants, he will become a rich man, his farm boys will praise the day he gave them work.”

“Oh-ya-yi!” chorused the two farm boys who plodded behind Saleh. Saleh looked back at Temple again, and rubbed his buttocks through his grimy white tunic. Temple laughed to himself. He had landed three powerful kicks on Saleh’s behind when the men had turned up two hours after the train’s arrival. He was also forcing them all to walk beside the ox-team as further punishment — normally they would have sat on the back of the waggon, each one taking turns to lead the team. Saleh had sworn that a miserable, monkey-brained swine of a station sweeper had assured him the train was due later in the day, but the reek of corn beer on his breath tended to devalue his protestations of innocence.

Temple’s body jolted and swayed as the heavy waggon negotiated the ruts and stones of the track. The country around them was of thick scrubby thorn with the occasional small volcanic-shaped hill. Behind them lay the fertile Pare hills and the purple slopes of the great mountain, its flattish white top obscured by a cloudy afternoon haze. Temple’s mind turned to the von Bishops. What a train journey! Von Bishop seemed nice enough, but was he boring…And his voice: three days of that reedy falsetto had almost proved too much.

She was a fine woman, though. Big-breasted and broad-shouldered, with that creamy freckly skin of one just fresh from Europe. It was hard to keep that look. It wasn’t so much the sun and the heat but the constant nagging ailments: the fevers, the attacks of diarrhoea, insect bites and sores that never seemed to heal…They made a very strange couple, he thought. He wondered what it would be like living with von Bishop: that voice, day in, day out.

Temple winced, and looked at the swarming clouds of flies that buzzed around the rolling backs of the ox-team. Sometimes he wondered if he had been right to bring his wife and young family to Taveta, away from the comparative health and easeful climate of Nairobi. It hadn’t been very fair on Matilda or the children, he admitted. But he could never have afforded so much land in the highlands, could never have set himself up as he had down here. He gave a grim smile. Also, he doubted if he could have stood the society much longer: the mad aristocrats with their obsessive horse racing and hunting; the way the tiny society had evolved — almost overnight it seemed — its own rigid hierarchy, its preposterous code of values and bizarre snobbery. A club for senior officials and a club for junior ones. The endless bickering between the settlers and the government. The awesome privilege of riding after hyenas with the Maseru hunt, all hunting horns, tally-ho and view-halloo. God, Temple swore, the English! He was glad to have escaped. Now he had his own farm, a sisal factory and linseed plant that provided him with a steady turnover. He could stay at the Norfolk Hotel when he went to Nairobi now, take his entire family to the Bioscope — every night of the week if he felt like it. He squared his shoulders self-consciously and smoothed his moustache. It seemed better in German East. Less fun perhaps, but life was organized, and they appeared happy to accept everyone. Look at von Bishop, he thought, half-English, but a local hero.

“Taveta!” Saleh shouted.

Temple looked up. They had come over a small rise and the township of Taveta lay ahead. Among the dark green mango trees the sun flashed off tin roofs. Houses and buildings were scattered around haphazardly. The dirt road from Voi, to the east on the Mombasa — Nairobi railway, arrived and became Taveta’s main street. There was a post office, and a few bungalows belonging to the Assistant District Commissioner, the police inspector and a jailer. Some tin shacks did duty as the ADC‘s offices and courthouse. Forming three sides of a square were the whitewashed stone buildings of the police askari barracks, the jail and a stable block. An untidy heap of wooden huts and stalls at one end of the street marked the festering purlieus of the Indian bazaar. Sited as far away as possible, at the opposite end of town, was a new wooden store, run by a European. There were a few settler-farmers in the district, like Temple, but not many, as the Taveta — Voi district was not generally regarded as fertile farming land. Most of the farmers were Boers who, again like Temple, were not too enamoured of the British.

Temple’s ox-cart creaked slowly into Taveta. It was late afternoon and there was little activity. The place reminded Temple strongly of small western townships he had seen in Wyoming, which he visited once as a young man in the 1890’s. He wondered briefly if he should stop in at the store, run by an Irishman named O’Shaugnessy, and have a drink, but as he still had an hour’s journey to go before he reached his farm he decided to press on.

He wheeled the ox-team off the Taveta-Voi road and followed the meandering track south towards Lake Jipe that led to his farm.

He was only about ten minutes out of Taveta when his attention was caught by the sight of a saddled, riderless mule trotting round a bend in the road, followed, some seconds later, by a tall lanky figure in a white drill suit and solar topee, brandishing a riding crop and screaming foul insults at the animal. As soon as the figure saw Temple and the ox-cart he stopped at once, straightened his suit and dusted it down. Saleh grabbed the halter of the mule as it trotted past.

“I say, thanks a lot,” the white suited figure shouted and strolled over. Temple hauled on the reins and the oxen stopped at once. The man sauntered over, for all the world as if he were enjoying a Sunday afternoon stroll.

“Ah, Smith,” he said, raising the brim of his topee in greeting. “Pleasant day.”

It was the ADC from Taveta, called Wheech-Browning. He was very young, about 25 years old, and very tall, about six foot three or four, Temple calculated.

“Hello,” said Temple; he found it difficult to address Wheech-Browning by his preposterous name. “Having trouble?”

“Yes,” Wheech-Browning confessed. “I bought this bloody mule from a Syrian in Nairobi, for three hundred rupees, and he assured me the beast was broken in. He trotted out well enough, but then suddenly seemed to go raving mad.” He turned to look at the animal, standing motionless now it was attended by Saleh.

“Oh,” Wheech-Browning said. “Seems quiet enough now, but I can assure you the little beast bucked me clear off his back.” He paused. His face above his collar and tie was bright red and sweat trickled from beneath the brim of his topee. Temple found it extraordinary that this awkward, innocent youth sat in judgement over murderers, thieves and drunks every day in his sweltering tin courtroom, but he seemed to accept his duties unreflectingly. Temple had been in court once as prosecution witness against one of his own farm boys who’d stolen cattle from a neighbouring farm. He had seen Wheech-Browning sentence the quaking man to six months hard labour. A murder case had to be referred to the Provincial Commissioner’s court at Voi but it was obvious to Temple that Wheech-Browning could happily have condemned the accused to death and then gone out for a game of lawn tennis with the police inspector without a qualm.

Wheech-Browning patted the pockets of his jacket, and loosened his tie.

“Would you mind awfully if I cadged a ciggie off you, Smith? I must have lost mine when I was thrown.”

Temple took out a packet of cigarettes and offered him one.

“Dumb animals, eh?” Wheech-Browning said, exhaling smoke and looking at his mule. “Thought I’d got a real bargain. And talking of bargains,” he said, noticing the crates in Temple’s waggon, “what’ve you got there?”

“Coffee seedlings,” Temple said.

“Coffee? Here? Think they’ll grow, old chap?”

“Well, we won’t know till we try.”

“Got a point there, I suppose. Where did you get them? Nairobi? Nakuru?”

“No. I got them in Dar.”

“German East? Good Lord, how fascinating. Tell me, what’s it like? I’m hoping to get down to Dar for the exhibition thing in August. Our consul there was at Cambridge with a cousin of mine. How did you find the wa-Germani?”

“It’s a nice place,” Temple said. “Clean and neat. Efficient too — in Dar, certainly. But it was like an armed camp. Soldiers everywhere.”

“What you’d expect, really. Typical Hun mentality, always marching about.” He paused. “Well look Smith, mustn’t keep you. Thanks for catching my mule. Let’s hope the beastly thing’s more tranquil on the ride home. Don’t want to land on my arse again.”

He walked over and mounted the mule, an operation that was, for him, as easy as getting on a bicycle. When his feet were in the stirrups they were only six inches from the ground.

“Gee up,” Wheech-Browning ordered, and the mule obediently started walking in the direction of Taveta. Temple tried to stop himself from smiling at the ridiculous sight.

“Seems fine,” Wheech-Browning shouted over his shoulder. Then, “Oh, by the way, can you drop in and see me some time next week?”

Temple frowned. “Why?” he called.

“Those coffee seedlings from German East,” Wheech-Browning yelled. “You’ve got to pay me the customs duty on them.”

Temple was still cursing Wheech-Browning when he came in sight of his farm some thirty minutes later. ‘Smithville’, as he grandiosely referred to it, did not present an attractive aspect to the eye. His house was built on a small hill; or rather, it was being built. The two storey wooden frame house had been incomplete now for over two years. The ground floor, consisting of a dining room, sitting room and kitchen, was in working order, but only two of the three bedrooms on the floor above were habitable. The third bedroom, above the kitchen, had walls, a floor, but no roof. It had been left incomplete not so much through want of funds or building expertise but through lack of energy, all of that commodity having been claimed by and directed towards the construction of the sisal factory which, unfortunately for the house, still remained the centre of Temple’s world.

From the house the land sloped gently away towards the small patch of water — some two miles distant — that was Lake Jipe. Across the border in German East (which ran beyond the lake) rose the Pare hills, along whose other side Temple had travelled that morning in the train from Bangui to Moshi.

At the moment Temple’s farm was divided into plots of sisal, with their great spiky leaves like hugely enlarged pineapple crowns, and fields of linseed plants. At the foot of the hill on which the house stood was the ‘factory’. This was a large corrugated iron shed which contained Temple’s pride and joy: the Finnegan and Zabriskie sisal ‘Decorticator’, a towering, massive threshing machine that pulverized the stiff sisal leaves into limp bundies of fibrous hemp. A smaller shed beside it contained smaller, more domestic-sized crushers for processing the linseed berries. Grouped around this central nub of the ‘factory’ were other shaky lean-tos, relics of failed enterprises of the past.

A large number of fenced-off wooden pens had served first as a pig farm, which had flourished for nine months before swine-fever had decimated the entire herd in a fortnight. Undeterred, Temple had immediately adapted the enclosures for ostrich farming, raising the fencing until it stood six feet high, and taking out some of the intervening walls. He had bought thirty ostriches at considerable expense and had been looking forward to his first harvest of feathers and the outcome of his breeding efforts — eight huge eggs had been laid by the hens — when disaster struck for the second time. One night a pride of lions had broken in and killed every bird. The ostriches trapped in their corral had been absurdly easy prey, their long necks an inviting target and broken with one swipe of a paw or crunch of teeth. Temple could still recall the shock of witnessing the result of the massacre, standing knee-deep in feathers, surrounded by his ravaged, mangled flock. Ostrich farming had proved a costly failure. All the recompense he had received was a week of superb omelettes — for breakfast, lunch and supper — as he and his family had sadly eaten their way through the clutch of eggs.

All the same, Smithville had survived, sustained by the reliable but boring sisal and linseed. Temple had invested in the Decorticator as much in an attempt to liven up the business of farming as to save him the processing fees he had to pay if the hemp was made at Voi. Theoretically, his forty acres of sisal did not warrant the erection of the factory, but it had swiftly become one of the most exciting and joyous moments of his life to set the great Decorticator in motion, its engine belching smoke, the webbing drive belts flapping and cracking, the tin shed echoing to the crunch and clang of the flails as the bundies of sisal leaves were fed into the jaws of the machine by his terrified farm boys.

It was now almost dark and the sun was dropping behind the Pare hills, sending their blue shadows advancing across the orange lake. Temple had travelled faster than he expected. He got Saleh to unharness the oxen, supervising the careful unloading and storing of the coffee seedlings, and looked in briefly on the dark gleaming mass of the Decorticator before he trudged up the hill to the house.

Matilda, his wife, was sitting on the verandah reading, a book propped on her pregnant belly. She had a neat, bright face with round, very dark brown eyes. After Kermit Roosevelt had dismissed him, Temple had found temporary work with the American Industrial Mission near Nairobi, where his expertise had come in useful in the teaching of rudimentary engineering skills to the orphans, the mission housed and cared for. Matilda’s father, the Rev. Norman Espie, ran a mission a few miles away. Temple was sent to supervise the erection of a water tower and met Matilda. It was something about her enormous calm that attracted him and encouraged him to think of staying to make his future in the new and growing colony. The day he received notification that his savings had been transferred from Sturgis to the Bank of India, Nairobi, he proposed and was, with only a night intervening to allow further reflection, accepted.

Matilda looked up at the sound of his footsteps.

“Hello, dear,” she said, returning to her book. “Have a nice trip?”

“I did,” Temple said. His wife never ceased to astonish him: he might have popped out for ten minutes. “Very interesting. And successful.” He chose his words carefully, conscious of the creeping onset of guilt as he bent to kiss the top of her head. He had a sudden image of the oiled, compliant whore in the Kitumoinee Hotel. Now, in his home, with his wife, family and farm around him, he wondered what had possessed him to visit the place.

“How are you?” he said, a flood of tenderness making his voice tremble. He cleared his throat. “Everything go fine? No problems?”

“What?” Matilda said, looking up and squinting at him. “Oh yes. All well.”

“Good,” Temple said. “Good, good, good.” He sat down. There was a tray with a tea pot and milk jug on it. He cupped his hands round the pot.

“Coldish now, I should think,” Matilda said. “Why not have a peg?”

Temple squeezed her hand. “I think I will. Join me?” But she hadn’t heard, she was reading again.

Temple went into the house. The dining room table was covered with the residue of some disgusting meal. Enamel plates, glasses and cutlery were assembled haphazardly on its surface among damp spills and pieces of food. His children had been fed, that at least was something. He went through into the kitchen. This room was practically bare. In the centre of the floor stood a table. In a corner was a stoneware water filter and a large meatsafe, a fly-proofed cupboard whose four legs stood in small tins of water to protect it against invasion by the ants that swarmed everywhere on floor and walls. Along one of these walls was a three foot-high concrete trough, filled with charcoal and covered in thick iron grilles. It was on this crude instrument that all their cooking was done. Temple walked to the back door. In the gathering dusk he could just make out, beyond the privy and a huge pile of firewood, his cook and houseboy’s shamba, an untidy collection of woven and thatched straw and grass huts and ill-tended vegetable plots. He saw the plump figure of the ayah waddling up the hill, his baby daughter Emily balanced on her hip.

“Ayah,” he shouted. She was Indian, inherited from Matilda’s family, and spoke English. “Call Joseph,” he instructed. His voice carried to the shamba because shouts and screams of excitement promptly rose up from it, and the small pale bodies of his two boys, Glenway and Walker, hurtled from behind one of the huts and ran breathlessly towards him screaming “Papa, Papa!” in their shrill young voices.

He felt a twinge of irritation at Matilda’s complacency. The boys were not meant to play in the cook’s shamba. It was annoying to come back from a long and arduous journey to find the house in a mess and his instructions so heedlessly flouted. His two boys — Glenway nearly four and Walker nearly three — reached him and jumped up and down, tugging at his trousers and jacket. He picked them both up. Joseph, the houseboy, loped grinning behind them.

“Joseph,” Temple ordered, “one whisky and water, on the verandah, quickly.” Joseph ran off to get the whisky while Temple set his two boys back on the ground and then walked round towards the front, holding their hands.

He paused at the side for a moment, looking over his farm: the drying racks, the trolley lines, the factory, the neat rows of sisal and linseed stretching out to the shores of Lake Jipe, now dark and opaque. All around the crickets were trilling, somewhere a hyena barked. He saw Saleh and the farm boys walking back down the road to the village where the farm workers lived, a mile or so away on the banks of the thickly wooded river — the Lumi — that flowed into Lake Jipe. Over to his left, some distance off and invisible in the dark, was a small grove of wild fig trees which contained the grave of his third child, an unnamed baby girl, who had barely lived for a day.

Glenway pulled at his arm. “Come on, Papa,” he said. “Let’s go in.” Temple looked down at his children. He found it strange that they spoke with English accents — said ‘P’pah’ instead of ‘Poppa’. It was an indication, he ruefully admitted, of the amount of time he spent with them. They walked round to the front of the house. Matilda still sat on the verandah, an oil lamp on the table illuminating her book. In the dining room he could see Joseph clearing away the remains of the children’s meal. He felt the comforting presence of his family form around him, the reassuring familiarity of the things he owned and the things he had grown or made occupying their appointed places in the gathering dark — from the two hundred fragile green shoots of the coffee seedlings to the imposing bulk of the Decorticator; from the thousands of sisal and linseed plants to the fences he’d erected at his land’s perimeter just a few yards from the border with German East.

They were like pinions that fixed him to the soil; clamps that fastened and bound him to this new life he’d chosen. He ruffled his son’s hair, enjoying the pleasant sensations, his heart big with self-satisfaction and pride.

“Where did you go?” Walker asked him as they climbed the steps to the verandah.

“To another country,” Temple said.

“What did you do there?”

“I bought some coffee plants and…” he paused, sensing the beginnings of a blush spread across his cheeks. “And, guess what, I saw a big battleship and lots of soldiers.”

“Soldiers,” Glenway said, his eyes gleaming. “Are they going to fight in a war?”

Temple laughed. “Did you hear that, Matilda? A war? Don’t be silly, Glenway. There isn’t going to be a war. Well, at least not here in Africa, anyways.”

4: 24 July 1914, Ashurst, Kent, England

Felix Cobb stepped out of the train at Ashurst station. He put his bags down on the platform, took off his glasses and folded them away in their case. The wrought iron railings behind the station building had been recently repainted and bright tubs of geraniums stood evenly spaced out along the length of the platform.

The train puffed off and Felix realized he had been the only passenger to get out. For a second he thought he’d left his hat on the train before he remembered that he and Holland had decided to go about bareheaded. He waited a little longer. It was clear no one had come to meet him. He felt the irrational hatred of his family, which he’d vowed to keep banked down this weekend, flare up inside him. Typical, he thought: a family of soldiers and they can’t even organize someone to meet me off the train. He picked up his suitcases and walked out of the station, handing his ticket to the sleepy collector on the way.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning and the sun blazed down from a washed-out blue sky. Felix felt his clothes heavy on his body. He wore an old tweed jacket and navy blue serge trousers, a new soft-collared bright emerald green flannel shirt and a red tie. Both these last items had been purchased the day before on Holland’s instructions.

Felix ran his finger between the prickly collar and his moist, chafing neck. The stationyard was also empty, except for two horse-drawn drays from which chums of milk were being unloaded. The boys hefting the churns looked not much younger than him, sixteen or seventeen. They wore large flat caps, collarless shirts with the sleeves rolled up, coarse woollen trousers that stopped at the ankles, and heavy, clumsy-looking boots. Felix sensed he was being scrutinized. He tried to look at ease and approachable, hoping his coloured shirt would proclaim him an ally. He wished he was still carrying the book he had been reading on the train — it was Kropotkin’s Social Anarchy after all — but realized that, even if the two boys could have read the name of the author, it would be unlikely to have much significance for them. Instead he kicked casually at a pebble and whistled a couple of bars of ‘All Night Long He Calls Her’, a tune he’d come to like recently. He tapped his pockets, wondering if he had time for a cigarette. Perhaps he should set off and walk the mile into Ashurst village: he could get someone to take him out to the house from there.

“Bloody family,” he said out loud. “Damn bloody damn bloody family.”

Felix was of average height — five foot nine — and slimly built. His lips were full and a dark pink, almost as if he had rouged them. This vaguely effeminate feature was counter-balanced by his blue-ish beard, unusually heavy for an eighteen-year-old, on his upper lip, spreading from the corners of his mouth and on to his chin, as if it had been blacked in for theatricals. The skin around his eyes had a brown foxed look (which might have indicated a tendency to insomnia), but the most arresting feature of his face was his eyebrows, prematurely thick and wiry, barely thinning where they met above his unexceptionable nose.

Felix took a cigarette from his cigarette case, and was about to light it when a car — a Humberette — pulled in to the station yard, the klaxon giving a strangled hoot of welcome. When Felix saw who was driving all the accumulating tensions and irritations of the day cleared themselves. It was Gabriel, his brother. Gabriel stepped out of the car and gave a salute, clicking his heels together ostentatiously. He was wearing a Norfolk jacket, a shirt with a cravat and grey flannel trousers.

“Your excellency,” Gabriel said. “Your motor is waiting.”

“Gabe,” Felix said. “You’re here.”

“Looks like it, old fellow. Can’t miss your own wedding, you know.” He strode forward, his hand out, smiling. He was tall and broad-shouldered. His pale brown hair was cut short and parted neatly in the middle. His face was square, as if his jaw muscles were permanently clenched, and his features were even and pleasant. He looked strong and a bit simple. Gabriel was the only member of his family to whom Felix gave his love uncritically and unreservedly. He was twenty-seven and a captain in his father’s old regiment, the Duke of Connaught’s Own West Kents, currently stationed in India, from where he’d just returned. Felix shook his hand, squeezing hard.

They got into the Humberette, Gabriel driving.

“Ready?” he said. “Off we go.”

They turned right out of the station yard and drove off up the main road from Ashurst to Sevenoaks.

“How’s the army?” Felix asked, raising his voice above the noise of the puttering engine. “Boring?”

“How’s school?” Gabriel riposted, not rising to the bait.

“Over, thank God. And now,” Felix paused, stretching luxuriously, “Oxford.”

Gabriel glanced at him. “When did you clear that with Father?”

“Oh he doesn’t bother about me, Gabe. He gave me up as a bad job years ago. Mother told me he didn’t mind.”

“Lucky old you. But that shirt won’t be popular, I can promise you.”

Felix took out his cigarette case. “Want one?” he offered.

“No thanks, old chap, not while I’m driving.”

Felix lit his and blew smoke at the passing countryside. The bulging hedgerows were bright with flowers, but the leaves on the trees and bushes looked tired and dull. So far, the summer of 1914 had been a good one. The cornfields were bleached and ready for harvest; some fields already contained their line of reapers, scythes swishing rhythmically as they made their slow but steady advance into the ranks of corn.

They turned off the main road and the hedges rose to overshadow the lane. Driving through shade after the sun made Felix shiver.

“It’s all so predictable, isn’t it?” he said.

“What?”

“Summer. You know: hot sun, corn, birds singing. All that rot.”

Gabriel looked at him, smiling. “Honestly, Felix, sometimes I just can’t make you out at all.”

Felix shrugged. “Never mind.” He paused. “Looking forward to tomorrow?”

Gabriel stiffened slightly, then relaxed. “Of course, you idiot. After all, it was me who asked her to get married, not anyone else. She — that is, Charis — is looking forward to meeting you.” He smiled again. “Can’t think why. I’ve told her all about you. Right clever Dick, my little brother is, I said. Hey!”

Felix punched Gabriel lightly in the shoulder causing the car to swerve.

“Watch out, Gabe,” Felix said mock-seriously. “‘Bride-groom and best man in automobile accident.’”

“Talking about best man,” Gabriel said, “remind me to have a word later on today.”

“Words of advice from big brother?”

“Something like that.”

They drove on another mile before they reached a gate set in a long stone wall. They drove through it and up an avenue of elms towards the medium-sized country house which was Stackpole Manor.

“Home sweet home,” Felix said.

The elms gave way to high rhododendrons. In front of the house was a gravelled square and a lawn on which two little girls in pale pink lacy dresses scampered, being chased by a small yapping terrier. Three cars were parked in front of the main door.

“Good Lord!” said Felix. “Don’t tell me Mother’s started a taxi service.”

“Just the family,” Gabriel said. “Gathering of the clans. Nearly everyone’s here.”

“Oh no,” Felix groaned, then, as the two little girls ran up: “Let me guess, these are Albertine’s. What are their names, Gabriel? I can’t remember.”

“My God, Felix, you can certainly spout rubbish.”

“Hello, Felix,” said one of the little girls shyly.

“Uncle Felix, please, Dora. But hello anyway, Dora. And hello to you, Harriet,” he said in deep, suitably avuncular tones. “If that’s your beastly dog will you please stop it barking like that.”

Felix stood on the gravel and looked up at the manor house. It was a strange building. The front of the house, which faced to the north, was a classical three-storey Georgian brick façade with a neat pillared portico around the front door and regular rows of sash windows precisely descending in size as they moved higher. However, Felix’s uncle Gerald, the previous occupant, had added what was in effect an entirely new and larger building to the back, obliterating the austere southern façade with an edifice of modern design. This forced Siamese pairing was, to Felix’s eyes, an act of desecration. Now the landscaped south lawns were confronted by a cluttered and inelegant jumble of styles. On the ground floor were three reception rooms sharing a long stone terrace. The ground floor walls were of red brick but the two above them were faced with hanging tiles, reminiscent of grossly enlarged fish scales. The large bay window of the downstairs drawing room was carried up through the next two floors to form a squat turret. Other bay windows rising from the new dining room and library were half-timbered, the windows filled with leaded lights. Felix’s father, Major Cobb, had made his mark on the unhappy building by enlarging the servants’ wing to the east — new kitchen, scullery and pantry, wash house and coal cellar. And at the western extremity Mrs Cobb, not to be outdone, had appended a neo-gothic conservatory and loggia.

Gabriel stood at the door with Felix’s bags watching him with amused tolerance.

“Come on, Felix,” he said. “You’ve only been up to London for ten days. It’s scarcely the return of the prodigal.”

“Well that’s what it feels like,” Felix said. “Even when I’ve only been away for a night. What possesses them to live in the place?”

He didn’t need an answer; he knew why. Stackpole Manor had been bought by his late uncle, Gerald Cobb, who had astutely invested the meagre Cobb inheritance in the electro-plating industry. With the money he’d made he had bought Stackpole Manor, built on his new half, and had settled down with his wife, Mary, to raise a family. No offspring had been forthcoming, however, and the deficiency or whoever was responsible for it had never come to light. In 1896 Gerald Cobb drowned in a sailing accident. His widow left the Manor and took her childless grief and increasingly unbalanced mental state to another house the family owned some ten miles away. The Manor, the home farm and the electro-plating works in Wolverhampton passed to Gerald’s younger brother, Hamish, a major in the Duke of Connaught’s Own West Kent regiment. Major Cobb resigned his commission and established himself in the Manor forthwith. And as if to taunt brother Gerald’s shade, the major and his wife promptly conceived and produced a child, Felix, some ten years after they had assumed their large family to be complete. Felix had been born and brought up in Stackpole Manor, yet he, of all the Cobb children (there were four others, girls, apart from Gabriel and himself) was the least attracted to the place, the most reluctant to call it home.

They went into the hall. It was unnaturally dark after the glare outside, and deliciously cool. The hall was tiled in black and white marble. A wooden staircase swept up from the middle and divided itself in two against the wall, beneath what had once been a large window. This, however, had been bricked in as a result of Uncle Gerald’s extensions, and now the only light came from two small casement windows on either side of the front door. Double doors led off to reception rooms to the right and left and other doors had been knocked through the back wall to gain access to the new apartments. From one of these ushered Felix’s mother with plaintive cries of, “Felix, darling, darling, you’re home.”

Felix allowed himself to be enveloped in his mother’s plump, odorous arms. She was a large soft pink woman, dressed, as ever, in the latest fashions. Today she wore a heliotrope satin tea-gown, fastened at the side with a large hook.

As he had grown older Felix had come to realize that his mother was a redoubtably silly and sentimental woman. But, equally, as this awareness had established itself so had a steadily growing respect for the certain innate qualities of shrewdness and intractability she exhibited. He saw that she treated her marriage to his father as a relentless challenge, an unending struggle under appallingly adverse conditions to get her own way. At first this manifested itself only in the naming of her children, but lately, as she had come to know her enemy, or as he had grown more senile and eccentric, evidence of her own long suppressed personality came increasingly to the fore. She dressed in the most unsuitable clothes, followed interests that, in the earlier years of her marriage, would have been banned forthwith, and, for this was her greatest weakness, surreptitiously indulged in her taste for the modern. She had installed refrigeration in the kitchen, electrified the house, bought motor cars and, her current campaign, was trying to move from coal fires to hot water heating.

Felix was, he now accepted, a living proof of this silent life-long insurrection. As her youngest son, and through lack of interest on his ageing father’s part, he had been indulged and brought up in a way quite different from that of his brother and sisters. Felix also realized that this triumph of his mother had prompted the animosity that existed between him and his sisters and the mutual near-contempt that he and his father held for each other. From his mother’s point of view, the kind of person he now was — independent, self-assured, above all, different— stood as a monument, living testimony to her own spirit and pluck. But it brought with it its own share of problems.

However, Felix thought, as he allowed his mother’s love to wash unobstructed over him, he was glad she had persevered. And besides, he reflected, there was no telling that he might have turned out as he had anyway. Gabriel had been the focus of his father’s ambitions and attention all his life and yet he had barely been corrupted by militarism. The two were as close as brothers could be. Parents, he decided, had only a superficial impact on their offspring. As Holland said: you either had the right soul or you hadn’t.

He turned his attention back to his mother, who was pushing the lock of hair off his forehead and being sceptical about his health.

“Are you well, Felix? Darling, I do like your shirt and tie. Don’t you think he looks tired, Gabriel? Do you want to lie down, my dear?”

“No thank you, Mother. I’m fine.”

“Did you have a pleasant time with the Hollands? You didn’t do too much I hope.”

“Rest assured on that point, Mother. Holland and I do as little as possible. Am I in my own room?”

“Of course. Nearly everyone’s here. Yseult and Henry, and little Charles. Oh, he’s in your dressing room. I hope you don’t mind. We’re so crowded. And Albertine and Greville. Did you see the girls outside? We’re just waiting for Eustacia and Nigel…” She paused. “Do you want to see your father, dear? He’s upstairs, in his study.”

“Not really,” Felix said breezily. “I’ll see him at dinner, shan’t I?”

After lunch — a veal mould, cold meat and pickles — Felix and Gabriel went for a walk in the garden. From the back of the house a long lawn sloped gently down about fifty yards to three large ornamental fishponds, planted round with bushes and stocked with fat, slow carp. On the right was an ornamental rose garden separated from the lawn by a neat briar hedge. Carefully aligned screens carried a riotous freight of ramblers. A path avenued with pleached lime trees led through the screens and flower beds to a dark yew bower, decorated with spanking new classical busts. Neglected for a few years, everything now evidenced the most careful cultivation. Ornamental gardens, Mrs Cobb intuited, would be back in favour soon. On the left of the lawn was an orchard with wooden beehives scattered about it. Beyond the orchard a beech and oak wood grew.

“Heavens,” Felix said. “What a heat!” He took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. It was one of those flabby, corpulent midsummer days.

“Fancy a swim?” Gabriel suggested.

“Good idea, that man,” Felix said. “Just let me change. I’ll get some towels.”

Ten minutes later Gabriel and Felix — now dressed in white flannels, open necked shirt and rope-soled tennis shoes — climbed over the eve-gate at the foot of the orchard, walked across the small bridge that spanned the stream feeding the fishponds and set out along a mud path that led through the wood. About a quarter of a mile from the Manor they stopped at the garden gate of a small stone cottage. The lawn had been freshly mown and the flower beds newly hoed and replanted. Even what Felix could see of the driveway on the other side looked re-gravelled.

“What do you think?” Gabriel asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Like it? It’s where Charis and I are going to live. Father and Mother’s wedding present.”

“Oh. Very nice. But didn’t Cyril live here?” Felix referred to the Manor’s young gardener and odd-job man.

“Yes. He’s been moved to the village. We had to do a lot of work on the place. Cyril and co. lived in a fair old squalor.” Gabriel paused, looking over his new home with pride. “Charis hasn’t seen it yet.”

“Where is she by the way?” Felix asked. “She is around somewhere, I take it.”

“Yes, you great oaf. She’s staying over at Melton with Aunt Mary.”

“Aunt Mary? God help the poor girl. Whose idea was that?”

“Not much alternative, I’m afraid. Bride and groom have got to be kept apart. Her papa can’t come over from India…Aunt Mary’s not that bad.”

“She has her days.”

“Anyway I saw Charis yesterday. She’s fine.”

Felix tested the garden gate, noting the new latch. “I bet Cyril wasn’t too pleased about being turfed out.”

“Who?”

“Cyril.” Sometimes Gabriel was so slow. “Whose house this was.” Felix laughed. “Lord the air must have been blue.” But Gabriel had already walked ahead.

“Come on,” Gabriel shouted. “Cut along, Cobb, cut along.”

Felix caught up with him as they tramped over the dry crumbling furrows at the edge of a silently restless com field.

“Haven’t had a dip in the pond for years, have we, Felix?” Gabriel said. “D’you remember that day we pushed Eustacia in?”

“Useless Eustace,” Felix said. “Father leathered us though.” He picked up a stick and swished it at clumps of dusty nettles and delicate cow-parsley heads.

“Is that how you decapitate Pathans or fuzzy-wuzzies or whatever you call them, Gabriel?” He brutally hacked down a stand of ragwort in illustration.

“I wish it were,” Gabriel said. “I’m afraid I’ve wielded nothing more lethal against my fellow man than a polo mallet.”

“That’s good,” Felix cried. He always liked to celebrate Gabriel’s rare sallies of wit.

“I’ve stuck a few wild pigs, though,” Gabriel said.

“Disgusting habit. Did they squeal terribly? Do stuck pigs squeal?”

“I should say they do. I would squeal if somebody stuck me.” Gabriel looked serious for a moment. “I may soon be doing worse than that. We all may.”

“What? Worse than sticking pigs?”

“No. Raising arms against our fellow man.”

“What are you talking about, Gabriel?”

“The Anglo-German war. It’s coming, Felix. I’m sure of it.”

“Do they only take the Daily Mail in your mess?” Felix scoffed. “I’ve never heard such rot. There’s not going to be any war.” He ran ahead, leaping and bounding in a theatrical imitation of euphoria. “Holland says everyone is having far too good a time to go to war. Don’t you think this is the most wonderful time to be alive, Gabriel?”

Gabriel smiled. “Well I suppose I do. But then I’ve got my own special reasons.”

“So have I,” Felix said, “I think I’d rather be living now than at any other time. Don’t you think so? There’s so much in the air.” They climbed over a gate.

“Besides,” Felix went on, “they can’t have a war. I’m going to Oxford.”

“Oh well then, of course not. I’m sure the Kaiser will wait until you’ve got your B.A.”

They had reached the river. It ran turbidly between wheat fields, before some subterranean impediment caused it to take an unusually sharp bend. At this point five mature weeping willows grew over the large pool formed by the swerve in the river’s progress. The gentle current eddied and swirled, slowly cutting into the facing bank. On one side of the pool was a mud and pebble beach. On the other the overhanging bank shadowed a wide channel some six to eight feet deep. It was possible to climb the willow trees and drop into the cool green waters from a considerable height.

“Looks inviting,” Gabriel said, unbuttoning his shirt. “It seems to get bigger every year.” He slipped off his clothes until he stood naked.

“I hope there’s no country maiden passing by,” he said and climbed easily up the accommodating boughs of the willow trees, before launching himself with a whoop into the pool. He swam splashily across to the far side and sloshed out of the water on to the beach.

“Superb,” he called. “Come on, slowcoach. It’s not a bit cold.”

Felix stared for a moment at his brother’s powerful naked body, dappled with the knife-like shadows of the willow leaves. He had a broad slab of a chest covered in a sprinkling of fine blond hairs. His abdomen was flat and muscled and the line of his pelvis was clearly marked. His ruddy, pink cock and balls, tensed from the cold water, were compact in their nest of gingery brown hairs that spread across his groin over his heavy thighs. Water runnelled off his chest and stomach and dripped in a stream from his stubby cock. His scrotum, big as a fist, was wrinkled and firm.

Felix felt himself blushing. He folded his trousers and shirt with undue care and laid them at the foot of the willow. He was conscious of his white half-formed body, his thin chest, his little tuft of pubic hair. Gabriel seemed so solid in comparison, his body tapering from broad shoulders. Felix felt feeble and soft. He undid the cord on his drawers and let them fall to his ankles. He climbed the tree and almost immediately felt dizzy and insecure. He looked down at the swirling shifting mass of the water, the frolicking prisms of light, some twelve feet below. It seemed like a hundred and twenty. He hung on to a branch, gathering his courage. Gabriel stood waiting on the mud beach, arms akimbo.

“Jump, Felix. Leap in. It won’t hurt.”

Felix let go of his reassuring bough and fell.

♦

Felix dried his hair with the towel and ran it one last time over his naked body. A beam of afternoon sun broke through the willow leaves and warmed his left hip and thigh. Holding the towel in front of him he covertly ran his hand over his cock and balls, feeling the sensations swarm and jostle. If Gabriel hadn’t been present, he thought, he would have frigged there and then, in the open air.

Gabriel pulled on his shirt and tucked it into his flannels. He held out his arms and breathed deeply.

“Ah, splendid,” he said. “I used to dream about this sort of afternoon when I was in India.” He ran both his hands through his damp hair. “Got a comb?” he asked smiling.

Felix was silenced for an instant with a sudden tingling surge of inarticulate love for his brother. He felt numb and weightless with its power. He swallowed. “No,” he said. “Silly. I should have brought one.”

“Never mind, never mind.” Gabriel clawed his hair into shape with stiff fingers. He looked at Felix.

“Felix, you know I wanted to talk to you about this best man business?”

“Don’t worry, Gabriel. I’ve been working on my speech for days. Very funny, have everyone in stitches. Nothing improper, mind you.”

“Oh.” Gabriel looked pained.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Well, you know I asked you to be best man because I thought that Sammy — Sammy Hinshelwood, in my battalion — wouldn’t be on leave…”

“Yes. I don’t quite see.”

“Well, he is. On leave. He told me last week. He telegraphed.”

Felix felt his face tighten.

“Well, old chap, I’ve known Sammy for ages, and that was the original plan and—”

“You’ve known me for ages too.” Felix somehow managed a laugh.

“I would have told you earlier but it’s all been so hectic. Sammy’s down here now staying at the pub in the village. Charis knows him too. She’d like Sammy to…We had the rehearsal last night and everything. I said you wouldn’t mind. But look, old fellow, I’d like you to be chief usher, if you would. Be an awfully big help.”

Felix pulled on his drawers and tugged his shirt over his head. He relaxed his facial muscles for the instant his face was covered, then clenched his teeth and shut his eyes. Stupid rotting wedding, he thought, as his head pushed through the collar. I don’t care.

“Don’t worry, Gabe,” he said with a bright hard smile. “I can see your problem. No, fine. Glad to do your ushering for you. It was a pretty dreadful speech anyway, I’m sure.”

♦

Felix gazed out of his bedroom window at the south lawn and the fishponds. He saw Cyril, the gardener, trudge across it from the orchard, a heavy bucket in his hand, on the way to feed the carp. As if to complement Felix’s mood the brilliant day had suddenly clouded over, as it can in an English summer, and had become cool. The fishponds, before a deep and placid blue, were now mouse-grey and crinkled by a breeze.

“Charis knows him too. She’d like Sammy to…” The words hummed in his head. He knew who to blame for his bitter disappointment. Damn Charis, he thought. Damn bloody Charis. During the walk back from the willow pool he had been brittle and gay, expressing all sorts of outlandish opinions on White Slavery, the Cailloux case in Paris, the assembly of the fleet at Spithead and had loudly announced his plans to take dance lessons in order to master the Tango and Maxixe. This was a Felix Gabriel knew well, and he had laughed and humoured him, apparently glad to see him back on iconoclastic form.

Once back in his room Felix had punched his pillow, sworn and impulsively ripped his best man’s speech into pieces. He was annoyed to find his eyes smarting with tears of frustration and hurt. He resolved to be steely and cynical at all costs. No one should guess how he felt let down and betrayed. Sammy Hinshelwood. Another wretched soldier, boisterous and hearty. How he detested the army!

He lay on his bed and smoked a cigarette, watching the blue braided fumes curl and disintegrate above his head. His trunks from school had arrived while he was away at Holland’s and they had not been unpacked, as he had requested.

Unlocking one, he took out some books and a cardboard cylinder. From this he removed a coloured poster. It was an offer from de Reske cigarettes, one of the brands he smoked. On receipt of six empty packets the poster was sent free of charge. It portrayed a young couple sitting at a table. A slim young man in evening dress leant forward, cupping his chin in one hand, his other behind him, languidly resting on the seat back, a smoking cigarette held between two fingers. He gazed dreamily into the eyes of an equally slim woman, who leant forward also, thereby causing her considerable bosom to press against the low-cut bodice of her silk gown.

What fascinated and stimulated Felix about this picture was the marked disproportion of the woman’s breasts to her elegant frail form, and the way she leant forward, provocatively offering them in their décolleté, as some kind of reward for her companion’s sophisticated taste in choosing to smoke de Reske.

Felix spread the picture on the hearth rug. He weighted one side with an ashtray and rubbed his groin area experimentally through his cotton trousers. Normally the visual and physical stimulus produced instantaneous results, but on this occasion it seemed merely a bored mechanical exercise. He picked up his ashtray, repackaged his advertisement and resumed his seat by the window, staring emptily at the lawn, the ponds and the fields beyond, now shadowed by the passage of evening breezes.

Later Hester, the upstairs housemaid, drew him a bath. He bathed and changed for dinner. The family, he knew, would be gathering in the inner hall in preparation for the evening meal, but he felt not the slightest inclination to join them. He sat down at his desk and took out some writing paper from a drawer. He scored out ‘Stackpole Manor’ on the letter head and wrote ‘Bleak House’ in its place. He would write to Holland, his friend and inspiration from school, the only person who could understand him, who could appreciate and share his mood.

My dear Holland, (he wrote)

My head aches and a drowsy numbness pains my neck. I am home again. This despicable house is like some vast malodorous carcass dropped in Kent, silvery with putrefaction and occupied by sleek pale complacent maggots, most of whom are wearing military uniforms. My family, God save me from my family. There is not one ‘soul’ among them. (I except, as always, brother and groom Gabriel — though he is not himself. On perusing a copy of my wedding speech he told me it was far too inflammatory and provocative for the intolerant and sensitive ears of my assembled relations. Platitudes, he said, all that we require are platitudes and homilies and perhaps one or two well-known jokes. I of course refused to alter a single word and have, as a result, been demoted from best man to chief usher. I am unrepentant.)

Shall you know the others? Cressida, my eldest sister, unmarried and rapidly stoutening, humourless and intolerably bossy, who now runs the household leaving my dear mother free to pursue her ‘enthusiasms’. As I write, the driveway is filled with motors of every type and description. Then Yseult, pale and simple minded. Shamelessly compliant and cowed by her grotesque husband, the booming Falstaffian Lt Col. Henry Hyams. They are accompanied by their egregious child, Charles, my nephew, currently depriving me of the use of my elegant dressing room. Next we have the twins; Albertine (quite nice, I admit, and cheerful) and Eustacia (horribly embittered) and their respective spouses. Albertine trapped the hon. Greville Verschoyle — another soldier, captain or major, or something. Eustacia contrived to snare, only last year, Lieutenant Nigel Bathe — with an ‘e’, mark you. The Nigel Bathes must be the most unpleasant couple I know. Soldiers, soldiers everywhere. One of the advantages, for daughters, of having a father who’s a major and spending their lives in garrison towns. Even dear Gabriel is a soldier. Revolting Charles will become one, I’m sure. Leaving only me and my two delightful but very noisy nieces (Hattie and Dora: why do they name them after scullery maids?) uncalled to the colours. I have saved the best ‘til last. I have talked of my father before, have I not? I have still to see him, though I have been here all day—

He was interrupted by the brassy crescendo of the first dinner gong. He put down his pen. He had described his family to Holland many times before, but the letter had been therapeutic. He felt quite restored.

He checked his reflection in the cheval-glass that stood in the corner of his room. His hair…Holland had abandoned hair cream and macassar so Felix had followed suit. They were growing their hair longer too. Prudence, however, dictated that tonight would not be a good time to draw his father’s attention to its length. He took a bottle from his trunk and poured some oil into his right palm, rubbed his hands together and smoothed them over his head. He combed his hair again, slicking it down close to his head. With his little finger he dislodged a congealed strand so that it fell across his forehead. He made a silent wager that his father would tell him to get his hair cut. He straightened his bow tie. The second gong sounded in the hall.

At the door of his bedroom he bumped into Charles, similarly attired in a dinner suit. Charles was a thin child with sad eyes and a weak chin. He had inherited none of his father’s potent geniality.

“Where on earth do you think you’re going?” Felix demanded, impeding Charles’s progress down the corridor.

“To dinner, Uncle Felix.”

“Dinner? Children don’t eat dinner now.”

“Oh but Grandmama said tonight we could. All of us together. Seeing as it’s the wedding tomorrow.”

Felix raised his eyebrows. “Hattie and Dora too?”

“Yes.”

This was intolerable. “Good God! All right, you go on down.” Charles left in a rush. Felix lit a cigarette, allowing Charles time to get downstairs well before it was time to make his entrance.

♦

The inner hall was the most comfortable room in the house. It was large and high-ceilinged and more frequently used than any other. The walls were panelled in light oak and cretonne-covered armchairs and sofas were grouped in front of a sizeable fireplace with inglenooks. The floor was parquetine and scattered with Indian rugs. It was set to one side of the house, wedged in, as it were, between the original building and the new additions. A leaded window looked out onto the drive and the kitchen extensions.

Most of the Cobb family were present when Felix entered, one hand in a pocket, the other holding his cigarette nonchalantly at waist height. Dora and Hattie sat in one corner wearing frilly lace dresses and accompanied by their governess. They were very quiet and well-behaved. In a large group by the fireplace sat his mother, Yseult and Albertine. Ranged before the chimney-piece were the men: Gabriel, Sammy Hinshelwood, Greville Verschoyle and Lt Col. Hyams, the last of whom was laughing very loudly, one hand clamped on the shoulder of his miserable son who stood at his side, head bowed as if expecting a blow. Scanning the room Felix noted the absence of Cressida — who was presumably supervising the serving of dinner — the Nigel Bathes and his father.

His mother was the first to notice his arrival.

“Felix, darling,” she said, rising to her feet. “Come and sit down. You must be tired after your swim.” She advanced to take his arm, as if he were some kind of invalid or partially blind. “Should you be smoking?” She added as an afterthought.

“Felix,” Albertine cried. “Smoking. Do you mind?”

“It’s all right, Mother,” he said, gently releasing his elbow from her grip. “I’ll stand with the men.” He hoped the irony in his tone was evident: he was going to assert his personality tonight come what may. He greeted those members of his family whom he had not yet seen and politely answered a few questions about leaving school and going to Oxford.

“Felix,” Henry Hyams called. “Sherry? Can he have a sherry, Mrs Cobb, now he’s old enough to smoke? Ha-wha-wha!”

Felix helped himself to a sherry from one of the crystal decanters that stood on a table near the window, trying to ignore his brother-in-law’s imbecile hilarity. There was gin, brandy, whisky and a soda siphon, but he thought he’d better not go too far too quickly. He rejoined the group by the fire.

“Sorry to have deposed you as best man, Felix,” Sammy Hinshelwood said. He was a fair-looking young man with a small moustache and a receding hairline. He held one hand behind his back as if standing at ease on a parade ground.

Felix sipped his sherry. “Don’t worry about it.” he said, darting a glance at Gabriel, who was talking to Henry Hyams. “I was only first reserve anyway. Good that you could get on leave.”

“Yes,” Hinshelwood said. “It was short notice, but I’m glad I’m around to see Gabbers getting spliced at last.”

“Sorry. Gabbers?” Felix said disingenuously.

“Gabbers. Old Gabbers over there. Your bro. Cap’n Cobb, no less.”

“Oh, Gabbers. Yes.” Felix turned to his mother. “Any sign of the Nigel Bathes, Mother?”

“Yes, darling. They arrived half an hour ago. They’re getting changed.”

“Pity,” Felix said under his breath. He could happily have done without the Bathes. Eustacia, though Albertine’s twin, did not possess even her modicum of prettiness and was a surly moody person at the best of tunes. Nigel Bathe, her husband, complemented her sourness with an endless stream of grievances and alleged injustices which he claimed the world at large was always visiting on him. Wrongly totalled mess bills, unfair allocations of duty, uncongenial postings and the like. The list was endless. It took very little time for the Bathes to depress the tone and atmosphere of any gathering.

Felix drained his sherry and was about to get a refill when Henry Hyams attracted his attention by loudly calling his name and raising his hand as if he were trying to halt a stream of traffic. Henry Hyams was a large portly man who filled his dinner suit to capacity. The fat on his neck bulged over his stiff collar and he looked hot and trussed up. He had very small pale blue eyes, a waxed moustache and his thinning hair was brushed forward over his forehead and stuck there in a curl with hair oil.

“Yes, Henry?” Felix said patiently, modulating his voice in respectful falling tones.

“Oxford, Felix, Oxford.”

“Yes, Henry?” Felix repeated, this time on a rising note.

“What’s it all about, man? What’s it all about? Not entering the church are you? Mmphwaw!” He gave a snorting bark of laughter.

“Certainly not,” Felix answered promptly.

“Felix is going up to read, um, modern history,” his mother interrupted. “That is right, dear, isn’t it? I was so pleased to hear it was modern.”

“Modem history!” came an outraged bellow from the doorway. “I’ll give you modern history!”

Everyone whirled round in alarm. It was Major Cobb.

Felix was always surprised that his family were by and large reasonably tall when he saw his father. Major Cobb was a small man who had once been powerfully built. Some evidence of those early endowments was still visible, but since leaving the army he had grown dangerously fat. Tonight, Felix thought, he looked like a tiny, black and white, angry box. He was wearing — inexplicably — black knickerbockers and white silk stockings, buckled shoes, a tail coat, dickie and stiff wing collar with a white bow tie. Across his left breast jingled a row of medals. He looked like a diminutive ambassador about to present his credentials at the court of Saint James’s. He was almost completely bald, but, against the fashion of the time, retained colour of old piano keys, as if he were just recovering from an illness or about to be seriously afflicted by one. He had heavy bags below his eyes and his upper lids were plump wattles. The swagged folds of flesh left only thin slits for him to peer through. A thoroughly unpleasant looking man, all in all, Felix thought. He prayed earnestly that his own old age wouldn’t leave him similarly disadvantaged.

He stamped into the centre of the room flourishing a rolled up newspaper and hurled it into the fire. This gesture would have had more symbolic force if the fire had been lit. As it was it just rebounded from the fire back and struck the gaping Charles just below the knee.

“That damned villain, Carson!” the major said. “He ought to be boiled in oil!”

“Hamish!” Mrs Cobb shrieked. “Calm yourself! The children are here.”

“Modern…wretched history. I don’t know. Where will it end?” He glanced wildly round the room as if noting its occupants for the first time. “Home Rule, syndicalism, militants, suffragettes. I spit on them all!” he seethed.

Felix turned away. He’d seen these displays too often to be fearful or even impressed. Little Charles, to whom the last remarks had been addressed, looked as if he had just been sentenced to Sir Edward Carson’s fate.

“No point in getting steamed up, Hamish,” Henry Hyams said jovially. “Seven-day wonder stuff, don’t you know.”

The major was led to a chair and seated, a whisky and soda placed in his trembling hand. Felix sidled up to Gabriel as the major began to heap more iniquities on the home rule question.

“Why is he dressed like that?” Felix whispered. “Is he going mad or what?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I think it’s something to do with the wedding.”

“But he wasn’t like this at Eustacia’s. Mind you, that’s understandable. Oh. Talk of the devil.”

Eustacia and Nigel Bathe had come in, unnoticed in the wake of the major’s tirade, and were still standing in the doorway being offended. Eustacia was very dark, with Felix’s colouring, even down to the hint of a moustache, but her face lacked all animation, as if permanently slumped in disgruntlement. Two deep lines were scored from the edge of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

“Why, Mother,” she plaintively rebuked. “We’ve been standing here five minutes while you all row and fling newspapers.”

Mrs Cobb rose to her feet for a third time. “How pretty you look, Eustacia,” she said serenely, in a dreamy, far-away voice. “Isn’t that lovely. Crêpe de chine?” She fingered the sleeve of Eustacia’s blouse.

“Nigel!” shouted Henry Hyams diplomatically. “Sirrah. Come ye hither and meet Sammy Hinshelwood.”

Nigel Bathe, a pale blond soft-edged man, joined the group by the fire. Felix peered at him. Yes, he had thought so, Nigel Bathe had grown a moustache, a thin, almost white thing that in a certain light was invisible.

“Everybody here at last,” sighed Mrs Cobb as if transported with joy.

“Except Charis,” Gabriel added.

“Ah yes. Except Charis.”

“Poor Charis,” Greville Verschoyle laughed. “I wonder what Aunt Mary’s having for dinner?” Then remembering that Aunt Mary wasn’t his aunt and catching Albertine’s reproving look, said, “Sorry…erm. I mean shame she couldn’t be with us, what? Eh, Gabriel? Charis, that is…”

“Good evening, Father,” Felix said to the major who was staring at the soda bubbles rising in his whisky glass. He looked round as if he were being addressed by a total stranger.

“Wha…? Eh? You’re meant to be in London.”

“Dinner is served,” Cressida called from the door. “Goodness, so many people.”

The major leapt to his feet. “Dinner at last,” he cried and marched off through his family at full speed into the dining room. Felix watched him go. What a horrible little man, he thought. He hadn’t seen his father for three months. He shook his head and put his sherry glass down on the chimney piece, watching his family organize themselves into the dining room. Cressida, Miss Stroud the governess, the two little girls, Albertine and Greville, the Nigel Bathes, small Charles advancing before Henry Hyams and Yseult, Mrs Cobb and Gabriel and finally Sammy Hinshelwood who stood at the door and said, “After you, Felix.”

Felix walked down the passageway towards the dining room. He went through the door and to his astonishment found his right arm firmly gripped at the elbow. It was his father.

“Got you, young fella-me-lad! Not so fast.” The major wheeled him round to one side to join a sheepish group made up of Charles and a nervous and fearful Hattie and Dora.

“What’s going on, Father?” Felix demanded, with an uneasy chuckle. He looked back over his shoulder and saw his mother nervously wringing her hands as the rest of the family milled round the table finding their places to Cressida’s instructions.

“Now,” the major said, in a hectoring schoolteacher’s voice. “Children don’t sit down to a meal without their hands being clean, do they? Let’s see ‘em!”

Charles and the little girls obediently displayed their spotless palms. Felix couldn’t quite believe what was happening.

“Just one moment, Father,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets and feeling his cheeks begin to burn as he grew aware of the rest of the family silently watching.

“Come on,” the major snapped. “One and all.”

“Father,” Felix persisted with forced patience, conscious of rage setting up a tremor in his voice. “I am not one of the children. I am not prepared to go through with this.”

“Hands, hands,” crowed the major. “I know you schoolboys. Dirty little beggars.”

Suddenly he snatched at Felix’s wrists, dragging his hands from his pockets.

“Hah!” he yelped. “See! Ink! Ink! Dirty little inky hands! I knew it.”

“Hamish,” Mrs Cobb trilled. “May we have grace please.”

Felix looked into his father’s eyes. Watery slits in a moist sallow face. They appeared perfectly sane to him. The major spun round and clapped his hands.

“Right, places everyone. Are we all ready?”

♦

Felix sat between Miss Stroud and Eustacia. The gleaming walnut dining table was fully extended to accommodate the family. The hatred and anger were just beginning to subside. He put down his soup spoon, leaving half his consommé: the scène with his father had ruined his appetite. He glanced up and down the table. Fifteen of us, he thought. How ghastly. The noise was deafening: seven or eight different conversations seemed to be going on at once to the clatter of silver on china as the last dregs of soup were cleared up.

Felix looked at Gabriel, who was sitting beside his mother. It wasn’t the same any more, now that he was getting married to this Charis, he thought bitterly. He wondered what she was like. He turned to Eustacia, who was dabbing at her downy upper lip with a napkin.

“Have you met Charis, Eustacia?”

“Me?” Eustacia loaded the small word with as much irony as it could take. “Goodness me, no. Oh no no no no. We weren’t invited. Just the Hyams and the Verschoyles. Leeds, it appears, is too far away to come for a house party. We did ask Gabriel to come up and stay, but it seems it wasn’t convenient at the time.” Eustacia prattled on, listing further slights, real or imaginary. Felix experienced a sense of boredom so intense it could have been a Pentecostal visitation. Serving maids cleared away the soup plates and the fish course was brought in. He declined. Snatches of conversation rose out of the hubbub.

“But don’t you see,” Henry Hyams said patiently. “We’d hardly send our fleet to the opening of the Kiel canal if we thought the thing was a danger to European peace. If you ask me it makes sense.”

“We’re just as bad in their eyes,” Sammy Hinshelwood butted in. “Just as bad. I know this German chappie who’s convinced our King wants war because once, in his youth, in Paris — for various, um, undisclosed purposes — the King wanted to borrow some money off the Kaiser, and the Kaiser refused. Quite right too, if I may say so.”

“Sammy, really,” Albertine said.

“And they think the King’s had it in for the Kaiser ever since,” Sammy Hinshelwood concluded triumphantly.

Felix rolled his eyes in dismay, then looked down the table to his mother, who sat between Gabriel and Nigel Bathe.

“What assassination is this you’re talking about, dear?” his mother said. “Everyone seems to be getting assassinated these days. I can never remember who’s who. Is it that Rasputin fellow you mean?”

“No. The Archduke Ferdinand,” Nigel Bathe explained. “Heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire. In Sarajevo.” He was losing patience, Mrs Cobb’s face was still blank. “Three weeks ago, Serbia.”

“Oh yes,” Mrs Cobb said uncertainly. “Did I read about that somewhere, Gabriel?”

“Last week’s Illustrated London, Mother. There were pictures. Sarajevo, Mother. Everyone’s been talking about it.”

“These names, these places! Where on earth can they be?”

“And his wife too,” Nigel Bathe added grimly. “Revolvers.” He levelled two fingers at Mrs Cobb. “Bang! Shot dead by socialists. Just like that. Bang! Bang!”

Mrs Cobb flinched as the shots were fired. “Oh dear.” She seemed suddenly quite distraught.

Felix sat back and rubbed his eyes. Disembodied sentences filled his ears. He felt something like panic course suddenly through his body.

“…Did you go to Henley this year, Albertine?…”

“…You can’t trust Johnny Sepoy any more. Not since the mutiny…”

“…I hope you don’t mind me asking but what age were you when you got your captaincy?…”

“…We want reasonable progress, but not unreasonable change…”

“…It cost me seventeen guineas…”

“…Henry, would you be a dear and carve? Hamish seems busy…”

Felix opened his eyes and stared at the light fixture that hung above the dining table, an ugly wooden chandelier with six light bulbs, suspended on a kind of weighted pulley so that it could be raised and lowered. Empty candelabra stood in the middle of the table. He heard a thud, which gave him a start. All the silver rattled and one of the candelabra swayed and toppled over.

“Intolerable!” exclaimed the major, silencing all conversations. “Quite disgraceful!”

Felix looked distastefully at his father’s sagging face. “What is it, Hamish?” Mrs Cobb asked with concern.

“Albertine tells me that now they’re allowing women to boxing matches. Can you credit it?”

Conversation resumed at once when it was realized nothing significant was happening. Albertine looked a little chastened at the venom her innocent, observation had unleashed, as the major detailed the punishments he’d impose on any daughter of his who ever so much as tried to purchase a ticket.

Felix couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Aren’t you making a terrible fuss about nothing, Father?” he said in his most languid voice. “You’ll let a woman nurse soldiers on a battlefield. Why not watch a boxing match for heaven’s sake?”

“That,” said the major, sitting bolt upright in his chair, “has got absolutely nothing to do with it. Nursing is a duty, a vocation. This is mere titillation. Pleasure seeking.”

“Surely you are not going to deny the fair sex some innocent pleasure?” Felix said.

“Innocent?” the major gasped. He seemed genuinely shocked. “How dare you!”

He banged the table again with his fist and this time all the lights went out. Eustacia gave a little scream at the sudden gloom the room was plunged into. A greyish evening light filtered in through the south windows; everyone looked sick or old. Hattie — or was it Dora? — started to cry.

“For God’s sake, Agatha,” the major bellowed down the table at his wife. “This is all your fault. What was wrong with the gas, that’s what I want to know?”

“Don’t panic,” called Henry Hyams, still clutching the carving knife and fork. “Women and children first!” He started roaring with laughter, which only incensed the major further.

“Ring the damned bell,” shouted the major. “The bell. Get a servant in here, for God’s sake.” He jumped to his feet and followed his own advice, striding to the bell push set in the wall and, jamming his finger down on the button as if it were a detonator, held it there.

“Father,” Felix said, getting up. “I’ll go. The generator will have broken down, that’s all. By the way,” he said casually as he left the room, “you’re wasting your time. It’s an electric bell.” He quickly pulled the door shut behind him as he heard his father’s wrath erupt again.

He looked about him: the entire house was in darkness. He could hear a babble of voices from the kitchen. He walked down the passageway and through the swing doors.

“Hello, May,” he said to the cook. “Generator gone, I suppose. Cyril about?”

May was a thin elderly woman with a sourer expression than Eustacia’s, which effectively contradicted any vernal notions summoned up by her name. She jerked her thumb at the back door beyond which lay the coal store and wash house.

“He’m out back, Mister Felix. Shouldn’t take him a minute. ‘S always stopping these days.”

Felix stepped outside. The cool gloom of a cloudy summer night caused him to shiver. He walked quietly down to the wash house, part of which had been given over to the new electric light plant. Cyril, the gardener and handy man, was bent over the machine, peering at it with the aid of a torch. Felix paused at the door and listened to him muttering.

“Fuckin buggerin no good bit a bloody lump a scrap metal. Most shittin buggerin useless fuckin heap of shite I’ve—”

“Evening Cyril.”

“Chroist! Ooh God. It’s you, Felix. Whew, gave me a bloody fright though. Jesus. How are you?”

Holland had told Felix it was a worthwhile exercise to get on friendly terms with someone from the working classes. Felix had chosen Cyril.

“Very well,” he said. “Machine packed in?”

“Forgot to put the bloody Benzol in, didn’t I?” Cyril rubbed his hands on his waistcoat. He was a big lumpy young man. Clean shaven with an unlined, almost Chinese look to his face. His hair was black and wiry and combed straight back which gave an odd streamlined bullet shape to his head.

“Like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it, pouring Benzol in that machine,” Cyril averred. “Here, I’d better get it going. Won’t be a tick.”

He unscrewed the top from a can of Benzol, placed a funnel in the generator’s fuel tank and poured the fuel in with a tinny gurgling sound. The smell of Benzol filled the cool room. Felix smiled to himself. Although it had started as an exercise to improve his conception of true socialist thinking, he found he liked Cyril a lot and enjoyed his candid, foul-mouthed company. Cyril told him anything he wanted to know.

Felix wandered over to the line of huge basins and picked-up an oily pamphlet that lay on the draining board. It was an instruction manual for the small motor that charged the battery the lights were run from. Holding it to the faint light coming in a window, he flicked through the pages.

“Cyril,” he said, chuckling to himself. “It says here that ‘an unskilled servant can do the work without any knowledge of electricity’. What’s going wrong?”

Cyril swore again. “I knows all about beggin’ electrics. I just don’t know how many people are going to be puttin’ up at the house do I? I sees it all lit up like some kind of…of a palace down the drive. Christ, I says, Cyril boy, if you don’t get some soddin’ Benzol in that motor them batteries’re going to be flatter than a stepmother’s kiss. And look what bloody happens just as I’m topping her up.” He jerked the lanyard on the motor and with a clatter the engine started up again.

“Bastard,” Cyril addressed the shuddering unit. The lights flickered and went on. He turned to Felix.

“How are you then, Felix? Looking forward to this wedding, then, are you?”

“Well, I suppose so. I haven’t met my future sister-in-law yet. She’s not long back from India. Cigarette?”

“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” Cyril wiped his hands on his trouser seat before accepting one. He looked at it. “Turkish?”

“Egyptian.” Felix lit both their cigarettes.

“Not bad,” Cyril exhaled. “Think I’ll stick to Woodbine all the same…Nah, I met her.” He adjusted his stance, widening his feet and easing his shoulders. “Day they came to chuck us out of the cottage. Mr Gabriel, Mrs Cobb and Miss…Whatsername.”

“Miss Lavery,” Felix over-articulated. “Miss. Charis. Lavery.”

“Charis, eh? Funny name. No, but, she seemed nice enough, though. Very pleasant. Sort of apologizing. I suppose she were a bit embarrassed seein’ as it were our house, like. Nice little cottage that was. Mind you, there are good things about living in the village. The pub, for starters.”

“Yes.”

Cyril ground his cigarette out with a toe of his heavy hobnailed boots, then picked the butt up and flicked it out of the door.

“I better get back home,” he said. “Or the wife’ll be thinking I’m stopping off for ale.” He put on his jacket, which had been draped over one of the basins. He wore a badly cut suit of thick coarse wool, almost like a blanket or felt. He took a wide flat cap out of his pocket and put it on.

“See you in church then, Felix,” he said, winking. “Cheer-ho.”

“What’s she like?” Felix said. “I mean, what does she look like?”

“Who? Miss Lavery?”

“Yes, I was just wondering.”

“Ooh. Small. Dark hair. Looks like a little girl beside Mister Gabriel. Spoke very kindly.”

“Well. I shall see for myself tomorrow.”

“Yep. That’s right.” Cyril removed a speck of tobacco from his tongue. He smacked his lips. “Don’t half leave a rum taste, those ciggies of yours, Felix. Where did you say they come from? Africa was it?”

“Sort of,” Felix said, lost in thought. “Yes. Africa.”

5: 25 July 1914, Stackpole, Kent, England

Felix took his place in the pew and rested his top hat on his knees. The last of the guests were seated and the assembled congregation in Stackpole church awaited the arrival of the bride.

Felix had performed his duties as usher — assisted by Charles — with a fixed polite smile on his face. The congregation was small, composed largely of family, local acquaintances and dignitaries, and on the bride’s side, a solitary aunt from Bristol, a small, plump, cheerful-looking person. Charis was being given away by an old friend of the Cobb family, Dr Venables.

Ever since breakfast Felix had felt he was going to be sick. And once again saliva flowed into his mouth and he had to make a severe effort to prevent his stomach from heaving. He looked down towards the altar and saw Gabriel’s broad back, resplendent in his red and blue dress uniform. He watched him lean sideways and whisper to Sammy Hinshelwood. Felix felt bitter pangs of resentment. He should be sitting there beside Gabriel, on this day of all days, not showing people to their seats like some major-domo. He turned round and looked back towards the church door. Charles had been deputed to stay there and keep watch for the arrival of the bride. Felix saw the two rows of servants from the Manor crammed into the pews at the back of the church. They had been occupying their seats now for almost an hour, having been obliged to arrive well before the guests turned up. Cyril caught his eye and allowed a look of malicious piety to cross his features as he sat beside his thin, hard-faced wife.

Charles scurried self-consciously down the aisle and whispered that the carriage had just rounded the corner up the road. Felix could hear the faint clop of horses’ hooves outside. He nodded to the organist who immediately struck up ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and the congregation rose to its feet. Two minutes later she entered, on the arm of Dr Venables.

Felix peered closely at his future sister-in-law but her face was shrouded in a veil. She was wearing a simple dress with a short train, clutched tenaciously by Hattie and Dora. Dr Venables, tall, pale, his oiled hair gleaming, towered above the bride who, beside him, appeared diminutive and girlish. As she passed Felix, he smelt a faint odour of rose water and saw her hands distinctly trembling as she gripped a bunch of lily-of-the-valley. He heard, he thought, the rattle of the stamens in the tiny waxy bells.

Gabriel stood at the head of the aisle, badly suppressing a broad grin of welcome and relief, splendid in his short red jacket and navy blue trousers.

Felix felt his nausea return. The church seemed suddenly filled with the ancient smells of dust and stone, mingled with the scent of flowers and rose water. He clutched the back of the pew in front of him and stared at his whitening knuckles. He did not raise his eyes again until the vicar invited them all to be seated.

♦

In front of the church door the photographers busily packed away their bulky equipment. Felix stood and watched them. The bride and groom had been carried off in the landaulette to the Manor where a reception was taking place. Most of the other motor cars, traps, carriages and pony carts had left also.

“Are you walking back, Felix?” came a voice.

Felix looked round, it was Dr Venables.

“Yes.” Felix said.

The doctor joined him. “Fascinating contraptions,” he said, indicating the heavy cameras being placed in their velvet-lined boxes. “To think that this day has been captured forever. Preserved on light-sensitive paper through the action of silver oxide. Is that right? I don’t pretend to know how it functions.”

“I think you’re right,” Felix said glumly, vaguely remembering the dreadful embarrassments of the group photograph. His mother almost swooning from tension; the major refusing to smile; Gabriel and Charis’s happiness almost palpable, like being in a warm, fuggy room. He realized now that they had been sharing a joy in each other’s company which he found almost intolerable to witness. He had been close to Gabriel — closer than to any other person — but what he saw happening between Gabriel and Charis was an intimacy of a higher order, and one he was convinced, in his tight frozen heart, that he was unlikely ever to experience.

He had glimpsed them squeezing hands, Gabriel’s knuckles white with effort, almost as his own had been on the pew-back some half an hour earlier. He felt overwhelmed by the passion of his jealousy and resentment. And the virulence of his own emotional upheavals had made him take less notice than normal of the finer details of the scène which usually he would have savoured with cynical relish. The covert jostling for prominence among sisters and in-laws, the Nigel Bathes freely using their elbows to secure their ground and having almost to be physically dislodged from it to allow Dr Venables and Charis’s aunt their rightful position at the front of the group. Even the features of Charis’s face were still indistinct: dark hair brushed forward and secured in a wavy fringe by a satin band; a round face, wide eyes, a firm determined chin, small sharp teeth disclosed by a mouth continually parted in a smile. He shut his eyes and swallowed as he suffered another attack of nausea.

“…charming girl, I think.” Dr Venables was speaking.

“Sorry, Dr Venables?…oh, the bride. I haven’t met her yet.”

“Yes, that’s right, you’ve been away. Lively, intelligent girl…I say, are you all right, Felix? You look a bit washed out.”

“I’m fine. The walk back ‘ll do me good. I think it’s something to do with the atmosphere in churches.”

Dr Venables smiled. “I’ll join you, if I may. There was some talk of sending a trap back to fetch me, but I dare say I’ve been forgotten in all the confusion.”

They walked out of the churchyard and turned up the lane that led from the village to the Manor. It was a bright day with a cool breeze and compact scudding clouds in the sky. Felix exaggeratedly inhaled and exhaled as they strode along.

Dr Venables lived and practised in Sevenoaks, though he had acted as the Cobb family doctor for as long as Felix could remember. He was a large, tall man in his fifties with a curiously smooth and fleshy complexion. He had a good head of hair and it showed no traces of grey. Felix suspected regular dyeing. His clothes were always elegant and well-fitting. His face would have been conventionally handsome had it not been for his corpulence and a certain slackness about his mouth, caused by a full, heavy bottom lip that seemed always to be hanging down from its pair and which was only held in place by a conscious setting of the chin. Felix liked him, and was always pleased to see him, though for no particular reason other than he seemed a sensible man who was prepared and happy to talk to him as an equal.

“So you weren’t too enamoured of the service,” Dr Venables observed.

Felix scoffed. “I think it’s ghastly. Not that I blame Gabriel and Charis,” he added quickly. “It’s just that occasions such as these bring out the worst in my family. I’d vowed that after Eustacia had married Nigel Bathe I’d never go to another wedding.” He paused. “Of course I wasn’t to know Gabriel would be the next,” he added thoughtfully.

“But they’re happy,” Dr Venables said. “You wouldn’t deny them their happiness.”

“No,” Felix said. “Of course not. It’s just that I don’t believe in it, somehow. The ritual, the…the false piety.”

Dr Venables smiled. Felix sensed he was being humoured.

“What do you believe in then, Felix?” he asked.

Felix stopped walking and looked about him. He went to the side of the lane and plucked two dog roses, a clump of elderberry and a stem of cow parsley. He held them out to Dr Venables.

“I believe in these,” he said with grim sincerity.

Dr Venables gave a great shout of laughter. “Why, Felix,” he said. “You…you sensualist you. You’re nothing but — what do they call it? — a neo-pagan. That’s what you are: a neo-pagan.”

Felix dropped the icons of his religion. He had been following Holland’s instructions to the letter. He didn’t believe in dog roses any more than he did the Church of England, but at least it was different.

“Well,” he said, conscious of the ground he had lost and trying to regain it. “At least it’s there. Visible. I can see them and feel them…” He remembered a line from Holland’s favourite, Ibsen. “One must go one’s own way,” he announced strongly, “and make one’s own mistakes.”

“Come on,” Dr Venables said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I think I know what you’re driving at. We’d better get a move on, though, or the party ‘ll be over.” They set off up the road.

“Now tell me,” Dr Venables said, “how are you looking forward to Oxford?”

♦

Felix toyed with his pudding, pushing the meringue and cream around with his spoon for a while before deciding to abandon it. He sipped at the champagne he had left in his glass. He felt mildly calmer, restored in part by a speech of utter fatuity made by Sammy Hinshelwood, without even one good joke in it, and that had lasted ten minutes too long.

Nigel Bathe, sitting opposite him, had been advising him for the last five minutes not to waste his time by going to Oxford, and how he, Nigel Bathe, had never for one instant — not for a split second — regretted never attending that seat of learning.

“But Nigel,” Felix interrupted reasonably. “You are a soldier. Oxford would have been wasted on you. I have no intention of becoming a soldier, I assure you. Never. Not ever.”

“Hoo! I wouldn’t let your father hear that,” Nigel Bathe said smugly.

“What’s this, Felix?” Henry Hyams boomed, leaning across Albertine to thrust his whiskered face in Felix’s direction. “What are you going to be then? A slacker? Wah-hah!” He seemed to find this, as he found most things he said, extremely funny.

Felix wondered what profession would most annoy them. “Actually,” he said, “I was thinking of becoming a journalist.”

“Felix!” Albertine said, in tones of genuine horror. While the three of them ran down the profession of journalism, Felix looked up to the head of the table to where Gabriel and his new wife sat. Felix had been introduced to her before the reception. She had a slim, underdeveloped figure, Felix had noted. Her hair was set in the latest fashion and he’d heard Eustacia pass the opinion that, for a bride, she was wearing too much powder and rouge. Now she was speaking rapidly and energetically to his mother who was nodding her head slowly in reply. To Felix she didn’t seem particularly beautiful or pretty, and he wondered what it was that had attracted Gabriel to her; why he should have settled for less.

Five minutes later, Henry Hyams leant confidentially across the table and said in a low voice, “Shall we repair to that inner sanctum where menfolk may indulge in their favourite weed?”

“And where none may say them nay, more to the point,” added Nigel Bathe glancing up the table at Eustacia.

The luncheon party was breaking up. Gabriel and Charis were being introduced to family friends by Mrs Cobb, the children were scampering around on the terrace, the major seemed to be asleep. Felix got to his feet and went to join his two brothers-in-law in the inner hall. Cigars were produced and lit, Henry Hyams dispensed brandy. Greville Verschoyle slipped into the room two minutes later.

“Brandy, Greville?” Henry Hyams offered.

“Rather. Some beano, eh? The major’s trying to collar a partner for billiards. Made my escape just in time.”

“Where’s Hinshelwood?” Nigel Bathe asked.

“Caught up in the bridal party, worse luck for him.”

“I thought you were meant to be best man anyway, Felix,” Henry Hyams said.

“That was the idea. But it was just a contingency plan. In case Sammy couldn’t get leave.”

“Bloody awful speech, I thought,” Greville said, as Henry Hyams lit his cigar.

Felix wandered over to the window and looked out over the drive. He felt a sense of bleak sadness spread slowly through him like a stain. Now Gabriel had gone, nothing could ever be the same here again, he thought. Ever. He heard a burst of raucous laughter from his brothers-in-law and turned back to look at the group. He felt like an anthropologist or explorer contemplating some foreign tribe. Henry Hyams was pouring more brandy. Felix went over to get his glass refilled.

“I should think old Gabriel’s looking forward to tonight,” Greville said with a smirk. “What’s the plan exactly? Are they stopping for the night in town? Or going straight to Deauville?”

“Deauville?” exclaimed Nigel Bathe in outrage. “Why on earth are they going to Deauville?”

“It’s called a honeymoon, Nigel,” Greville said. “They’re having a honeymoon in Deauville. It is Deauville, isn’t it?”

“Good God,” Nigel Bathe uttered, appalled, his sense of injustice causing his nostrils to twitch in disgust.

Henry Hyams ignored him. “It’s Trouville, actually. Just next door. No, they’re going straight over. Being driven to Folkestone. Steamer, then a train to Paris. Then on to Trouville.”

“Be a bit awkward on the train, won’t it?” Greville said.

Henry Hyams went purple in the face as he tried to prevent the mouthful of brandy he’d just taken snorting out of his nose.

“Are the Cobbs paying for this?” an aggrieved Nigel Bathe demanded. “That’s what I want to know. We only went to Brighton.”

Henry Hyams was swaying around as if in a railway carriage travelling at speed, lunging repeatedly at an imaginary bride. Greville Verschoyle was stooped over, pigeon-toed, pounding his knee with a fist, his face screwed up around his fat cigar in a rictus of mirth. To his surprise and shame Felix felt himself blushing. He left the room unobtrusively, hearing, as he closed the door behind him, Nigel Bathe plaintively demanding explanations.

“Look, come on you chaps. Do stop it. How can anyone afford Normandy in high season on a captain’s pay? That’s what I want to know. Has the gel got money of her own or something?”

Felix paused outside the door. He thought about going back into the dining room but decided against it. He walked instead up the passageway to the main hall. There it was cool and quiet. Through the front windows was a glimpse of the lawn, lime-green in the afternoon sun.

Felix was annoyed to find that he still felt offended and ashamed: offended to hear the men talking like that about Gabriel; ashamed that he — who prided himself on his worldliness — should be offended. He shook his head and allowed a bitter little smile to pass across his features. He couldn’t remember feeling so apart from his family: not one of them understood him, not one had an inkling of how his mind worked. Not even Gabriel, who—

“Hello, am I wanted or something?”

Felix looked round. It was Charis. She had just emerged from the large drawing room to the left of the hall where the presents were being displayed.

“No,” Felix said, indicating the front door. “I thought I might snatch a breath of fresh air.”

Charis smiled. “We haven’t had much of a chance to get acquainted, I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s all been so hectic. In fact we must be off soon or we’ll miss the boat…” she paused. “Gabriel said I should get these,” she held up two silver hip flasks. “They might be useful, he thought, if we went on a picnic.”

“Don’t let me keep you,” Felix said. The thought of Gabriel and Charis on a picnic filled him with an irrational jealousy. He felt a spasm of intense dislike for this dark slim girl pass through his body. What did she know of Gabriel? he asked himself scornfully. How could she possibly know what he was really like?

“Still,” Charis continued breezily, “I expect we’ll get to know each other better. Later.” She paused, clearly a little put out by Felix’s lack of response. “We won’t be far away,” she went on. “The cottage.” She smiled again warmly. “It’ll be so nice to get to know you properly. Gabriel’s told me so much about you.”

She talked on, but Felix was no longer listening. His face felt hot. Gabriel and this girl, talking about him! Gabriel sharing confidences…But Charis had stopped.

“I say, is everything all right, Felix?”

“Yes. Yes of course,” he gave her a light frozen smile, little more than the pushing of his top lip.

She looked at him concernedly. For a second he stared back, noticing her features with a microscopic intensity: her white powdered skin, the faint down of hair in front of her ears, the moist redness at the corner of her eyes, the shine of saliva on her teeth, the blue veins in her throat.

She touched her forehead. “It’s been a long day,” she said with a final effort to be friendly. Then she looked down. “Well, I mustn’t…I suppose I’d better see if Hester’s finished the packing.” She looked up, seeming to have regained her cheery composure.

“I will look forward to living here,” she chattered on. “We’ll have half the summer left, nearly. The three of us. Gabriel, me and you. Now I must run along. See you later, before we go.”

She turned and left. Felix watched her go.

♦

Felix stood with Dr Venables among the other guests outside the front of the house. They were waiting for the departure of the bride and groom. On the gravel before the front door stood the large Siddley-Deasey, its motor running and Cyril sitting in the front seat wearing his chauffeur’s peaked cap. Four heavy pigskin cases had been brought out by servants and strapped to the rack at the rear of the car. The gusty wind had cleared the sky of clouds and a warm afternoon sun shone on the bare heads of the guests and thickened the smoke of the post-prandial cigars.

Felix had composed himself after his ‘fit’ in the hall and had re-established a mood of jaundiced cynicism with which to see out the rest of the day. Nothing Gabriel or his ‘wife’ could do now would affect him in the slightest.

The front door opened and the twin objects of his indifference appeared, flanked by the major and Mrs Cobb. There was a burst of cheering and applause from the guests. As they stepped down onto the gravel, Hattie, Dora and Charles ran up with paper bags of rice and confetti. Little Dora, whose aim was erratic, threw in the stiff-armed lobbing way of young children and hurled a handful of rice full in the major’s face.

The major, who had been on the point of addressing a remark to his wife — and who had his mouth half-open for this purpose — found his eyes, nose and mouth suddenly stung and filled with a scatter of rice grains. He staggered back, whirling round in shock, shaking his head, blinking and spitting, but two or three grains had lodged themselves in his throat and a bout of severe barking coughs was found necessary to dislodge them. Felix watched in pitying amusement as his mother energetically thumped the major’s back while he hawked and retched — purple-faced — onto the gravel.

The oblivious crowd, meanwhile, swarmed past them and gathered round the motor car into which Gabriel and Charis had clambered.

Dr Venables offered Felix a handful of confetti from the paper bag he was holding.

“I won’t if you don’t mind,” Felix said.

Dr Venables looked at him quizzically. “Are you sure every-thing’s all right?” he asked.

Felix looked exasperated. “Everyone seems particularly concerned about my health today.”

“Suit yourself,” Dr Venables said, and pointedly tossed a handful of confetti at the car.

Gabriel and Charis sat in the rear seat, smiling radiantly at everyone and shouting their goodbyes. Felix heard his name called.

“Bye, Felix!” Gabriel shouted.

Felix coolly raised a palm in response, struggling to keep the emotions that had suddenly begun to turmoil within him in check. He was happy to back away as a path was cleared to allow the major — dizzy, streaming-eyed, and breathless — to make his farewells. Then the gears were engaged, Cyril tooted the horn and the car slowly pulled away to renewed cheers from the guests, the smiling faces of the happy couple framed together in the small rear window, waving good-bye, until a turn in the drive and a dense clump of rhododendrons eventually obscured the view.

6: 26 July 1914, Trouville-sur-Mer, France

Charis loved Gabriel. Of that fact she was absolutely sure. But there was no doubt that he was behaving most oddly.

They walked now along the crowded promenade at Trouville above the bright and frantic bathing beaches. It was eleven in the morning, they had been married for twenty-four hours and her virginity was still intact.

The journey from Stackpole to Trouville had been a frustrating history of delays. Cyril drove them down to Folkestone smoothly and expertly enough, but for some reason the steamer left the harbour an hour late, thereby ensuring that they missed their train to Paris. In Paris their planned stop for an evening meal had to be cancelled, and they rushed from the Gare du Nord to the Gare St Lazare and only just managed to catch the Amiens — Trouville express. The journey to the Normandy coast took four and a half hours and they arrived at Trouville ⁄ Deauville station at half past midnight. Charis was extremely disappointed. Trouville Casino held a ball every Saturday night and she and Gabriel had counted on attending it, even if only for an hour. Worse was to follow. When they eventually reached the Hotel d’Angleterre it was found that one piece of their luggage was missing.

Charis also noticed, as they approached their destination, a distinct, uncharacteristic increase of tension in Gabriel’s manner. Curiously, this seemed to be relieved by the loss of one of their cases rather than exacerbated. He saw her established in their suite of rooms, wolfed down a sandwich and a glass of milk and went directly back down to the station to see if he could get any sense out of the night porters. “Back soon, darling,” he had said. Charis undressed, put on her night clothes, got into bed and lay patiently waiting for him to return.

She thought it a little peculiar that the missing case should prove so important to him. But Gabriel knew best. When he returned an hour and a half later it was with the case but she was asleep, exhausted by the long day. She woke up as he climbed into bed beside her, her heart suddenly beating faster and a faint sense of panic over what she knew must next take place. But all Gabriel did was to lean over and kiss her affectionately on the cheek.

“Got the case, Carrie old girl. Let’s get some sleep, shall we? Honeymoon starts tomorrow,” was all he said and turned away from her, pulling the sheets over his shoulder. He was asleep within minutes, or so his even breathing seemed to indicate, Charis lay awake for a while longer, savouring-the unfamiliar experience of sharing her bed with a man. She thought vaguely about the morning and her ‘initiation into womanhood’. Aunt Bedelia had solemnly and ambiguously informed her about Gabriel’s nuptial duties. Gabriel was right, she reassured herself again, it was too important an event, too sensitive to risk while they were both tired and a bit irritable.

But in the morning Gabriel was up before her, standing on the balcony outside the bedroom.

“Wake up, Mrs Cobb,” he said with his familiar wide grin when he saw her sitting up in bed. “Far too nice a day for sleepyheads.”

He seemed in a very good mood and did not disturb her when she put on her clothes in the dressing room. She selected a v-necked blouse from the once-missing valise and reflected that, after all, he had been correct to spend half the night searching for it: it would have spoilt things not to have all her clothes with her on her first full day as Mrs Gabriel Cobb.

On their way down to the dining room, on the landing outside their rooms, Gabriel put his arms round her shoulders and gave her a kiss. His good humour was infectious and dispelled any lingering doubts she had about the events — or rather the lack of them — of the preceding night.

During breakfast they laughed and joked about the other guests in the hotel, trying to guess their identities. “A German Hebrew financier,” Gabriel said of one. “A millionaire from Dakota,” Charis suggested. ‘A pork-packer with his front-row tottie’, ‘two boudoir boys’. The Angleterre was, they both agreed, rather a ‘smart’ hotel, even if most of the fashionable crowd went to the Roches Noires across the street.

Later, they sat for a while on the hotel’s terrace. Gabriel read a copy of The Times that was two days old.

“It seems funny,” he said. “To think we weren’t married then.” He reached over and squeezed her hand. “It seems as if we’ve been married for ages.”

Charis wasn’t sure what he meant — she hardly felt married at all — but he said it so warmly that it seemed like the deepest compliment. Her eyes prickled with tears for a moment, so intense was her feeling of love for him. Dear, good Gabriel! She lowered her head to flick through the magazine she was holding. She heard Gabriel reading something out to her from The Times. She caught something about ‘Austria’ and ‘Russia’, but she wasn’t really paying attention.

A patch of sun inched across the terrace. She watched its slow progress towards her feet, happy for a while to be idle and still with her husband. She felt an unfamiliar pride in her new status and for a few minutes luxuriated in her contentment. But soon the sunbeam was warming her feet and she began to sense an irritation at Gabriel’s stolid absorption with the newspaper. He would have lots of time to read later, why did he have to take up so much of the first morning of their honeymoon? She saw him take out a cigarette from his cigarette case without his eyes leaving the page. He patted his pockets absent-mindedly for matches, eventually locating a box, and lit his cigarette.

Charis swallowed. The taste of breakfast coffee still in her mouth. How she longed for a cigarette! But Gabriel had told her more than once that he disapproved of her smoking. Ridiculous, silly old Gabriel. It was that family of his. He could be stuffy sometimes. Gabriel looked up.

“Everything fine, darling?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Is the paper so terribly interesting?”

“It is, actually,” Gabriel said, not detecting the implied complaint. “Didn’t have a chance to catch up with the news, what with the wedding and all.” He frowned. “Serious business.” He looked back at the front page again.

“Shall we bathe?” Charis suggested, prompted by the sun on her ankles.

“Mmm,” Gabriel said, still reading. “If you like.”

“I’ll go and get my costie.”

“Darling.” Gabriel jokingly rebuked her slang.

In the hotel room Charis smoked a cigarette out of a feeling of mild rebellion. She packed her swimming costume in a cotton draw-string bag. As she walked back down the stairs she chided herself for her irritation. It was Gabriel’s honey-moon too, she reasoned, and if it made him happy to linger over a newspaper after breakfast then he should do exactly as he pleased.

Now, as they walked along the promenade, Charis linked her arm through his and felt the cosy feelings of love — and self-congratulation at her own good fortune — return. He stood so tall above her; his shoulders as high as her head. They passed another couple from the hotel and Gabriel tipped his boater.

The beaches and the promenade were thronged with people, even though it was Sunday. If anything the crowds seemed better dressed in honour of the Sabbath. The promenade, her Baedeker said, “has been pithily described as the ‘Summer Boulevard of Paris’.” It was one reason why she had chosen Trouville for her honeymoon.

“Shall we go across to Deauville?” Gabriel said. “They say the beach is quieter there.”

“Oh no,” Charis said. “Baedeker says the beach is distinctly inferior. That’s why everyone’s here. Besides it’s such a long way,” she said. “And I’m roasting.”

“As you require, Mrs Cobb,” Gabriel said with mock deference, and led her down the steps onto the beach. They walked carefully across duckboards to the Hotel d’Angleterre’s striped changing tents.

“See you dans la mer,” Gabriel said as he turned towards those reserved for men.

Inside the tent it was dark and very warm and at first Charis could see nothing.

“Bonjour, Madame,” came a surprisingly loud and hoarse shout from one corner. Charis looked round in some alarm. The speaker was a very small old woman in black who was struggling to get out of a sagging wicker chair flanked by a mound of fresh towels and swimming costumes. With operatic gestures she ushered Charis into a canvas cubicle. She helped Charis undress, hanging up her clothes with great care and much fastidious smoothing of creases.

“Maillot?” she yelled, as Charis slipped her camisole top over her head.

“What? Oh…sorry,” Charis said, self-consciously covering her breasts with her arms. “Non,” she said, pointing towards the draw-string bag. “J’ai…dans le sac…”

The old woman shuffled out and Charis quickly pulled on her costume — knee-length knickerbockers, flouncy tunic and bathing hat, in red piped with yellow. Outside she blinked at the brightness of the sun and the sand. Down here on the beach it was much noisier than it seemed to be from the esplanade. There were shouts from beach vendors, bathers and children playing, and the regular soft crash of waves on the beach. People sat in deckchairs reading. A game of cricket was in progress a few yards away. A man in a rubber bathing cap and a huge towelling beach robe flapped up the sand towards the men’s tent. “Splendid!” he shouted at her as he stumbled past.

Charis couldn’t see Gabriel anywhere, so she assumed he must already be in the water. She picked her way, gingerly at first, and then with more confidence, down towards the breakers. The sand was loose, deep and warm on the upper reaches of the beach. Charis was glad she hadn’t worn her bathing shoes, she liked the feel of the sand beneath her bare soles.

At the water’s edge stood a group of men in uniform black swimming costumes. They were very sunburnt and their hair and bodies were sleeked with water.

“Guide baigneur, Madame?” one of them asked as she approached. “Soixante centimes.”

“No thanks…Non,” she said. The waves didn’t look too big and besides she didn’t need these men to support her in the water now she had her husband, wherever he might be.

“There you are,” Gabriel called, wading laboriously out of the surf. “Come on in, the water’s lovely.”

He walked up the beach to join her, shaking his head and wiping the water from his arms. Beside the bodies of the guides baigneurs Gabriel’s arms and shoulders looked very white and pink. She saw drops of water glistening in the wiry curls of chest hair that were visible above his costume top. The dark wool of his costume was shining and heavy from the water, sticking closely to his body. Charis didn’t dare let her eyes wander lower than his chest.

“Oh yes,” Gabriel said, admiring her bathing costume. “Very ultra-modern. Come on, let’s get it wet.”

He seized her hand and pulled her protesting down the beach. They ran into the waves, Charis gasping with shock as the water splashed on her warm skin, letting out a half-stifled shriek as the first sizeable wave thumped into her midriff, rocking her back on her heels.

“Gabriel!” she cried, catching hold of him for support. She felt his hands grip her waist. Beneath her palms the skin on his shoulders felt cool and fine.

“Steady, old girl,” he shouted, his square face smiling happily into her own, settling her on her feet. “You’re on your own now,” he said, then he turned and plunged into the throat of an incoming breaker.

♦

That night as she dressed for dinner, Charis thought about the perfection of the day. The swim, luncheon, a visit to Deauville racecourse to see the horses training, tea at the Eden-Casino, then back to the hotel and a delicious bath. It had been marvellous fun, Gabriel joking and laughing, giving her surreptitious kisses and hugs whenever they found themselves unobserved, calling her ‘old Mrs Cobb’.

She checked her reflection in a looking glass. Her hair was up, an ivory satin band around her head, her hair brushed low across her brow. She took a tiny spot of rouge on the tip of her little finger and rubbed it into her lips. She was wearing a new dress for the first time, part of her trousseau, an ankle-length dress in black velvet with silver beadwork on the bodice and sleeves. She walked out into the main room of their suite. Gabriel stood there in his evening suit, smoking a cigarette.

“Good Lord,” he said. “My, you look a swell, Mrs Cobb. Ain’t I the lucky chap.”

Charis smiled, a little automatically, she realized. She half-wished Gabriel didn’t feel he had to keep up this relentless joking and gaiety. It wasn’t necessary, they didn’t always have to be laughing and playing about. But Gabriel would persist. Now he clicked his heels and offered his arm as if he were a Prussian officer.

“Shall we see what’s for grub?” he said.

People looked round as they walked into the dining room. It was busy but not full up. August was the most popular month in Trouville, coinciding with the race meeting. It was Paris-by-the-sea then, she had read.

During the meal Gabriel ordered champagne which, she noticed, he drank considerably more of than her. Indeed, his mood grew steadily more subdued as the meal progressed; he spent a lot of time gazing around the room as if unwilling to catch her eye. Charis understood. She felt the same sensations in her chest: a kind of breathlessness, as if foreshadowing the onset of a panic. To calm them both down she started talking about the times they had had when they first met in India.

Charis had been born there. Her father was a railway engineer. Her mother had died of some fever or other when Charis was very young, so young that she retained no memory of her whatsoever. Charis had been promptly sent back to England to stay with a family who took care of ‘Indian children’. From there she had gone to Bristol to live with her Aunt Bedelia (her father’s sister) and attend the small private school for girls she ran. However much she had loved Aunt Bedelia she had been ‘bored blue’ by life in Bristol, and consequently at the age of eighteen went out to India to live with her father. For a year her father was based in Bombay, which she had thrived on, with its exotic cosmopolitan life — its yacht club and taxi-cabs, natives in European clothes, its box-wallahs and millionaire merchants.

But then he was posted up the line to a small garrison town and, if anything, Charis was bored even bluer than she had been in Bristol. Like it or not, she became one of the Railway People — no matter how elevated her father’s position as chief engineer — and therefore distinct from Canal People, Army People or Government People. It was true that senior Europeans in the four groups happily intermingled at tennis parties, sales-of-work, polo matches and regimental sports days, but Charis soon grew aware that try to ignore or overcome it as she might, she carried the categorization with her wherever she went.

The only time she felt she left it behind was when the European population moved up from the garrison town on the plains to the popular hill station of Mahar Tal. There were no Railway People in Mahar Tal as the railway stopped at the foot of the hills. Charis stayed with a friend, Eleanor, the daughter of a District Commissioner, and attained, by association, Government People status.

It was during her second summer at Mahar Tal that she met Gabriel. He had been seconded from his regiment to be a ‘bear leader’ to the son of a local rajah. This involved teaching the young boy how to ride, how to play cricket, tennis and badminton and generally inculcate all the social airs and graces of an English gentleman.

Charis met Gabriel at an ‘At Home’ given by one of the senior officials’ wives. Some tennis was played, tea and lemonade were drunk. The hill garden in which the ‘At Home’ took place was devoid of turf but full of English flowers and surrounded by oak and pine trees. Gabriel had been quite a ‘catch’. Since then Eleanor and she had never been quite such close friends.

Charis shook herself out of her reverie and looked across the table at him. Gabriel was cutting up a peach with meticulous surgical care, his head bowed over his plate. In India everything had possessed a wonderful dreamlike quality. Somehow, back in England it proved hard to sustain. Perhaps it was meeting Gabriel’s curious family: all those sisters and brothers-in-law, his batty Aunt Mary and his eccentric mother, the very peculiar little major, and Felix, ‘clever’ Felix, of whom Gabriel spoke most fondly, but who had seemed to her, if she were honest, an odious little prig.

No, she told herself, don’t criticize. Not tonight, of all nights. It was an ordinary family, just like most people’s. Only Gabriel’s perfection showed them up rather.

Gabriel looked up at this point and caught her smiling at him. He smiled back, a little uneasily, she thought.

“Fancy the Casino, Carrie?” he asked, pouring the remains of the champagne bottle into his glass. “Shall we see if we can make our fortune?”

The Casino! she thought. What on earth was he talking about? “I don’t think so, Gabriel,” she said. “Perhaps tomorrow night.”

“Fine,” he said, “fine,” and drained his glass.

They went into the hotel lounge where Gabriel ordered brandy and a cigar. When he finished these he suggested a walk, but Charis again demurred. He had another brandy before they went upstairs to their room. Once there, Charis found Gabriel’s lack of composure beginning to affect her too. As she sat before her dressing table in the dressing room her hands shook slightly as she removed the pins from her hair.

In the bedroom Gabriel cleared his throat loudly and said he was going down the corridor to the bathroom. Charis wondered for a moment why he wouldn’t use the one attached to their small suite but realized that this was a kind of ruse to give her a moment or two of privacy.

She felt a pulse beating in her temple and a tightening of her throat. She pulled a nightdress over her underclothes, without putting her arms through the sleeves, and removed her corset and knickers beneath it, as she had done all her life. It was curious, Charis suddenly thought, but she had never seen her naked body in a mirror. She put her underclothes away and climbed into bed, lying on the left hand side. That was where she had lain last night: she didn’t know if Gabriel had any preference.

In two minutes Gabriel returned.

“D’you know, I think the water’s better down there,” he said artlessly and ducked into the dressing room. Charis lay stiffly in the double bed. Dear Gabriel, she said to herself, as if it were a prayer, dear Gabriel, how I love you. Suddenly she reached over and extinguished the light by the bed. Then she realized that the central ceiling light was still burning. Did she have time to switch it out before Gabriel came back into the room? Would he switch it out? Ought she to remind him to do so? She slid out of bed and scampered to the door.

“Everything all right, Came?” Gabriel said.

She whirled round. He stood in the doorway of the small dressing room. He wore pyjamas with a blue and green stripe. For some reason she noticed he was wearing slippers.

She gave a shrill nervous laugh. “I thought I should lock the door.” Her hand moved towards the key. There was a cardboard sign hanging from the doorknob. ‘Priez de ne pas déranger, SVP’, it said. They should really hang that outside too, she thought in a moment of rationality. But no, she couldn’t, not with Gabriel watching. But the light? What about the light? She turned the key in the lock and looked round again. She caught Gabriel edging noiselessly sideways towards the bed with little shuffling steps.

“Hah,” he said nonsensically, his hands foolishly trying to slide into non-existent pockets in his pyjama trousers.

“Yes.” She marched briskly, more briskly than she intended, across the carpet and round to her side of the bed.

Gabriel wandered back to the door where he turned off the light.

“Yes,” she heard him say in the sudden darkness. “Mmmm.”

Charis got into bed for the second time. As she slid her legs down between the sheets the hem of her nightdress rode up above her knees. As she checked her automatic move to pull it down she experienced a mild thrill of illicit pleasure. She lay back on the pillow and put her arms by her side. Her heart was beating quickly, but not wildly, she thought. That was good. The room was dark. The chambermaid had closed the shutters but left the windows open for coolness. She waited. Where was Gabriel?

“Gabriel?” she said quietly.

“Yes?” he said. He hadn’t moved from the door.

“Are you all light?”

“I’m just letting my eyes get used to the dark. Fiendishly dark in here…with the lights out.”

“Oh. I see. Yes, you’re right, it is dark.”

“I think I can make things out a bit clearer now.”

“Good.”

He came uncertainly over to the bed. She felt it give as he sat down. A spring creaked.

“Just taking my slippers off.”

“Fine.” Charis congratulated herself on her calmness. She knew exactly — from a physiological point of view — what was going to happen. She felt it was a woman’s duty to know. Or at least that was what Aunt Bedelia had said. Aunt Bedelia could be a rather fierce person, and, Charis now realized, she had ‘advanced’ ideas. She had given her ambiguous, wordy books to read and had explained certain things to her. But her aunt, who had never married, couldn’t tell her what it would feel like. Charis was in genuine doubt about this. Eleanor had implied it was extremely unpleasant, though Eleanor had had no more opportunity to test her theories than Aunt Bedelia.

Finally Gabriel eased himself into bed beside her.

“Hello,” he said. She felt his hand grip hers.

“Hello,” she replied, her voice suddenly thick in her throat. She felt him roll towards her. His nose touched her cheek. She smelt the mingled scents of tooth-powder, brandy and cigars on his breath. He threw his right arm haphazardly across her body, just beneath her breasts. His left hand still squeezed her right hand. He kissed her and Charis tried to abandon herself to the mood of romance that she felt must be welling up somewhere inside her. But instead she was only conscious of a mounting sense of curiosity and alarm. What was Gabriel going to do next? What, if anything, should she be doing to help him?

Suddenly, with his lips still applied to hers, Gabriel heaved himself on top of her, his weight driving the air out of her lungs. She broke off the kiss and inhaled as quietly as she could. Gabriel’s face was now buried in her neck. She felt him shifting and her legs obediently widened. The hem of her nightdress rose still further up her thighs; she seemed to be excruciatingly conscious of its passage against her skin. She felt it being tugged gently higher. Gabriel’s right hand! His left still faithfully clasped hers. And now her heart did begin to thump and echo in her chest. The hem of her nightgown was now above her pubic hairs. Dear Gabriel, she said to herself again, dear Gabriel. She felt the thick cotton of his pyjama trousers against the inside of her thighs. He made tentative thrusting movements. Lord! she thought. Now his ‘erect member’ should penetrate her ‘vagina’. She had seen naked men, in statues and pictures — even swimming in rivers; glimpses of a white sausage thing hanging from a dark clump of hair. Now she felt something squashy pressing intimately against her, but there was, she was sure, no penetration of any kind. The weight of his body between her thighs was pleasant, so too was the way his nudging thrusting movements rocked her. But she knew it had to be hard, and there was nothing hard there, or so she thought.

Then Gabriel rolled off her. Charis lay immobile with astonishment.

“Are you all right?” Gabriel whispered.

“What?”

“You’re all right? I didn’t…upset you?”

“No,” she whispered. “No.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad. I didn’t want to, you know, upset you too much, the first time.”

“No I’m fine, really. Fine.”

“Good, good.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Night-night, Carrie,” he said, his tone buoyant with relief. “We’ll go to the château tomorrow, shall we?”

Charis lay back in bed. Tonight, she said to herself, Sunday the twenty-sixth of July 1914, I, Charis Cobb, nee Lavery, became a woman.

♦

The next day they hired an excursion-brake and went to the Château d’Hebentot, about ten miles away from Trouville. They stopped for a picnic — provided by the hotel — on the way, in the Forest of Toques. Gabriel was in a good mood again, and after their picnic offered Charis one of his cigarettes. The day was hot and cloudless. Charis sat with her back against a tree and Gabriel stretched out on the ground with his head in her lap. She puffed her smoke up into the branches above her and her uncertainties about the previous night disappeared under the onslaught of Gabriel’s relentless good humour. She was left, though, with the abiding thought that something had gone wrong last night; that in fact very little had occurred which should have, and this she found lingeringly discomfiting.

That evening Gabriel again indulged heavily in wine and postprandial brandies. The undressing and getting into bed was achieved with less fuss but with no real alteration in the subsequent events. Gabriel did spend more time kissing her, and for a while hugged her close before rolling heavily on top. Charis, having only a little second-hand knowledge to rely on, and having to use her imagination more than she liked, couldn’t work out what was happening with Gabriel’s anatomy, whether it was functioning perfectly or whether — a worrying idea this — it was some defect in her own make-up. She wondered if she ought to be doing something herself, and Gabriel was being too polite to ask it of her, but he never uttered a word, nor conveyed any hints she was performing inadequately. Once again, the presence of Gabriel between her thighs and such shoving and heaving as went on provided ghostly sensations of pleasure, notions of potential enjoyment. But, she wondered, perhaps this was all anyone ever felt? She knew, from Aunt Bedelia’s instructions, that there should be an issue of semen during the act. When Gabriel lay once more beside her she carried out a covert examination but all seemed to be as it always had. But then she had no real idea what semen would be like, should she encounter it, and so her bafflement remained constant.

Gabriel, as on the Sunday night, was extremely solicitous, asking her several times if she felt all right and expressing his earnest desire not to cause her any harm or emotional discomfort.

♦

They went bathing again on Tuesday, Charis braving the bellowing old crone in the bathing boxes, then splashing about happily in the crowded shallows. In the afternoon they walked down to the harbour and fishmarket to watch the fishing fleet come in.

That evening Gabriel drank two whiskies and soda before the meal, most of a bottle of claret and two brandies afterwards.

Charis’s preparations took the form of a fresh nightgown. As she pulled it over her head she heard Gabriel blunder into a chair. She felt a surge of irritation that he had to drink so much in order to ‘perform’ in so unsatisfactory a way. For a moment she looked forward to the end of the honeymoon, to the time when the nightly obligation to behave as honeymooners would be over.

She lay obediently in bed as Gabriel sheepishly emerged from the dressing room and went over to the door to switch off the light. On his journey back to the bed his hesitant, inebriated course caused him to collide heavily with the bedside locker.

“Ouch! Damn it!” he swore petulantly, hopping about on one foot. “Oui’. Good grief, that’s sore.”

Charis sat up in exasperation.

“What’s happening?” she said angrily.

Gabriel collapsed on the bed. “I cracked my knee on that wretched cupboard-thing,” he moaned in a sulky voice.

“Let me see.” Charis reached out for him, something in his little-boy tones making her less yielding, more firm. Gabriel levered his way across the bed to her.

“You great goose,” she said, relenting. “Who’s had too much to drink tonight, eh? Where’s your knee, you silly boy?” She grabbed hold of his proffered leg and started vigorously rubbing his knee. Gabriel rested his head on her shoulder, moaning.

“And stop moaning,” she said, “Serves you jolly well right.”

“Oooh,” Gabriel said, pretending to wail, carrying on with the joke. “Not so hard.” He put his arms round her. “Kiss it better. Go on.”

“No I will not,” Charis laughed, trying to push him away. He resisted. “Silly, drunken boys get spanks not kisses.” She tried to slap his wrist and they struggled on the bed. Charis felt the ribbons untie at the throat of her nightgown.

“Naughty,” she said warningly. Gabriel’s arms were tight around her.

“Mummy’ll be cross,” she said, without thinking. Gabriel’s lips were on her neck. Then lower. Suddenly his hand was cupped round a small breast, then, with a shock of horrified surprise, she realized his lips had slid down her chest and fastened on to a nipple. She felt the wet warmth of his mouth and longue, and the tug on her breast as he sucked.

My God! was her first reaction, what in God’s name does he think he’s doing? She felt the pressure and nuzzle again, and unthinkingly put her hand on the back of his head. Gabriel, she thought…she didn’t really understand. She leant slowly back against the headboard, feeling the unfamiliar length of his erection pressing against her thigh. “Who’s a naughty boy,” she said softly, unreflectingly easing her position. “Who’s a very naughty little boy?”

♦

When she awoke in the morning, Gabriel was already up and dressed. Charis’s first thoughts were of the previous night. Now at least she knew what an ‘issue of semen’ was. Pale yellowy, cloudy, sticky stuff, that required vigorous sponging to remove from cotton nightgowns. Gabriel had apologized for his precocity as Charis changed. But they had slept in each other’s arms. When she got back into bed Gabriel had snuggled up close to her, resting his head on her breasts, kissing her throat and hugging her, telling her of his love for her, and promising fantastic happiness and bliss in the manner of a seventeenth-century poem.

Charis had stroked his fair hair, happy at least that their marriage had attained some kind of normality. But she was, nonetheless, confused. Gabriel was big and strong, so proud and handsome. She didn’t want to mother him. But then with a flood of charity she thought why not? Every man needed simple comfort in his private moments. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Gabriel had been denied the normal care and affection a child should receive in his peculiar family. All those sisters, and sisters can be so bossy, resentful of little brothers.

And Felix was the real baby of the family too. Mrs Cobb seemed to dote on him to a foolish and exclusive extent. Under the circumstances, she reflected before going to sleep, it was an entirely reasonable, natural thing for Gabriel to seek that sort of affection from his wife.

She ushered these thoughts through her mind again as Gabriel came over to the bed and sat down. He smiled tenderly at her and took her hand.

“Are you all right, darling?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said with some irritation. Why was he always asking her this, as if she were some kind of invalid? Surely she should be the one being solicitous? But she checked herself. “Of course, darling,” she repeated.

“What do you feel like doing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Is it a nice day?”

“Super. We could bathe.”

“What about taking the steamer to Le Havre?”

“Or there’s a concert in the Casino this afternoon.”

“Oh not stuffy concerts, Gabriel. Please.”

He laughed. “All right. There’s a ball there on Saturday. Hope you won’t find that so stuffy.” He stood up. “Look lazybones,” he said. “I’ll see you downstairs. We’ll have a confab. over breakfast.”

Charis lay in bed for a few minutes after he had gone. She thought about the summer months ahead of them. The West Kents were still in India. Gabriel wasn’t sure whether to rejoin them or be temporarily re-gazetted to another regiment in England. Henry Hyams had said he could probably find Gabriel something in the Committee of Imperial Defence where he worked. Gabriel said it was tempting.

Charis wondered what it would be like living at Stackpole in the little cottage, wondered how much they would have to see of the other Cobbs. But no, she thought, she had ten whole days of her honeymoon left, she should concentrate on that. For the moment the future could take care of itself.

Perhaps everything would be perfect now, now that she knew what to do.

When she walked down the stairs into the large hall of the Angleterre she saw Gabriel bent down over the reception desk reading a newspaper with the assistance of the reception clerk. He broke off abruptly when he saw her and escorted her into the breakfast room with a frown on his face.

“What’s wrong?” she said, as she took her place at the table. “Can’t we get the steamer till this afternoon or something?”

“No,” he said, “it’s nothing like that.” He ran both hands over his hair. “That was a French newspaper. That chap was giving me a hand at translating. It’s just as well I spotted the headline. You know we don’t get the English papers until two days late.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Austria’s declared war on Serbia.”

She laughed with relief. “Serbia! Is that all? Another silly Balkan war?”

Gabriel looked grim. Really, she thought, never marry a soldier.

“We’ve got to go home,” he said firmly. “I knew it would happen. There’s nothing else for it. It’s the European war, Charis. We’ve got to go back. Right now. Today.”